Nice calculator, but it's missing an important field: How many hours per day do you keep your machines running. It assumes you run 24/7.
S3stat's nightly job needs 60 or 70 hours to run, but it all has to happen in the few hours after Amazon finishes delivering logfiles for the day. So I spin up 15 or so machines as spot instances that churn through the queue then shut down.
This calculator tells me that should cost $600 or so per day, when reality it is more like $12. So even though it claims Lambda could do the same thing for $5, it'd take a long time to win back the engineering cost of making the switch. (A little over a month for every hour I spent working on it, it seems).
One of the big value propositions of the cloud was to automatically provision extra servers in response to load - either like you are doing, or by detecting load spikes and spinning up instances.
Trouble is, people don't seem to do that. I see a lot of 'Boss says use the cloud, lets just provision our current network in AWS 24/7'.
I kind of see serverless abd redshift as a workaround for the fact that users are currently mostly doing it wrong, and will eventually figure out that an always on cloud deployment is more expensive than just hiring server or colo.
S3stat's nightly job needs 60 or 70 hours to run, but it all has to happen in the few hours after Amazon finishes delivering logfiles for the day. So I spin up 15 or so machines as spot instances that churn through the queue then shut down.
This calculator tells me that should cost $600 or so per day, when reality it is more like $12. So even though it claims Lambda could do the same thing for $5, it'd take a long time to win back the engineering cost of making the switch. (A little over a month for every hour I spent working on it, it seems).