How much would Pinterest or TripAdvisor cost

to host on the cloud?  

Ali Khajeh-Hosseini

@PlanForCloud, @AliKhajeh

Inspired by two blogs posts on HighScalability.com

http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/2/an-epic-tripadvisor-update-why-not-run-on-the-cloud-the-gran.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/5/21/pinterest-architecture-update-18-million-visitors-10x-growth.html

How much would it cost to deploy System X on Cloud Y?

$1.7M/year

Would it be cheaper to use deployment option X or Y?

e.g. reserved instances, different types of instances, different cloud providers…

Over 7,000 prices in PlanForCloud

$0.9M/year (using reserved instances)

1st month: $450K After: $38K/month

What happens to costs if system grows?

e.g. start with 410TB of S3 storage, then grow by 25% every month

Currently: $39K/month 1yr from now: $470K/month

Moral of the story?

It pays to do some upfront cost forecasting and comparing