Cloud Services - Amazon Web Services, AWS, Rackspace, Azure, etc

re:invent live and free this year. Because who wants to go to Vegas on their company's dime?

Finally I made the decision to go to the cloud and made a family Jottacloud subscription - 5TB, about 3 I’ll upload in the next months. Plan is to get finally all our photos and files available for all here on all devices: with rcloud upload and sync afterwards, and then the data is usable on iOS and Android on the Jottacloud app but more important that it is on the native iOS/Android files apps linked/clickable.

Trying to wrap my head around the process and potential cost of using AWS (Nimble Studio) for hobby-ist 3D modelling/rendering, kind of as a test-bed for taking on some freelance work in lieu of a workstation of my own.

When AWS say 16vCPU does that mean something equivalent to a 16 core CPU?

Also some of the EC2 instances seem to come with some amount of local storage, presumably anything written to these is wiped when you give it up and must be copied to some additional paid storage somewhere? scrap that, I see it's an option whether to have it persist or not.

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16 virtual cores. What that means in reality, I don't know. I'm not a CPU guy. But 16 is more than 8 and 8 is more than 4... you get the point.

"Each vCPU is a thread of a CPU core, except for T2 instances and 64-bit ARM platforms such as instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors and Apple Silicon Mac instances."
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-optimize-cpu.html

There's instance storage which dies when the instance dies. Don't think you can do things like snapshot it and reattach it to another instance, new instance, etc. We don't use servers with this, only EBS.

EBS volumes persist if the instance is stopped, but not if it is terminated.
You can stop an instance and then you just pay for the volume storage. You can snapshot an instance and terminate it kill its volumes and then restore it later from the snapshot. You will pay to store the snapshot(s) but obviously not as much as leaving an instance running.

EBS volumes persist if the instance is stopped, but not if it is terminated.

You can stop an instance and then you just pay for the volume storage. You can snapshot an instance and terminate it kill its volumes and then restore it later from the snapshot.

OK thanks, this sounds useful. Hopefully it will start to make sense to me soon.

Think I might start another account with free tier (looked at this over a year ago and then gave up) so I have some storage to play with initially.

Consider using Spot Instances for rendering - they are much cheaper than on-demand ones.

Yeah that bit is clear enough, and there's the option to render on VRay standalone on Linux, which could be even cheaper. However looking further into the nimble studio pricing there's a lot of overheads that might make it unsuitable for a solo 'artist' from a virtual desktop perspective anyway.

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You can snapshot a volume and then create a volume from that and attach it to an instance.

Much like swapping volumes in general with an instance

Also Spot instances are not to be scared of now with them being able to be used for Prod workloads etc without the fear they are going to whipped from underneath you, of course extreme cases can happen where these would be gone

Agree, we're rarely running out of machines in London DC, but it's mainly because we are very specific about instance types and London DC is not that big.

@Polygon, that's quite steep for what it is. Active Directory? Document DB for $200?

You could try speaking to these guys - https://sherpa.escape-technology.com. We considered them at some point. They are nice people but the price may be as steep as AWS.

Yeah, that's what you need to do to encrypt a non-encrypted volume or whatever.

The point I was making to OP, they're versatile but you pay to keep 'em.

Don't get why you need directory services like AD for rendering.

Maybe it's geared towards graphic design teams or something?

'Nimble Studio' definitely is aimed at production houses, less so solo artists, so I guess that's where I'm going wrong as I wouldn't require the same level of control over permissions and access to services. All I want is a single virtual workstation with a bit of storage attached at first, with the ability to use their 'usage base licencing' and then the ability to render on a bunch of spot instances later down the line.

Do you have the software? You can just spin up a vanilla instance and then install the software on it yourself and if you want to keep it around you can stop/start it and/or snapshot it and then bring up copies of it at a later date. (I think, I know nothing about your software, I just use AWS for serving web apps mostly)

If it's for one off stuff, you don't have to keep it around. But if you kill your instance you'll have to reinstall and copy your stuff to it every time. Storage costs are pretty cheap though (certainly compared to a running server)

I don't have licences no, but AWS do usage based licencing of the two main things I need. I imagine this will work out cheaper than just renting a year's licence if it's for sporadic after hours tinkering. No idea how this works in practice.

Yeah, so the cost of the instance + software license is built in. The pay as you use cost includes the lic. cost for the product.

So, we could buy an instance and install our own version of SQL on it, or we could pay more for an instance type with SQL bundled on it already or we could use their SQL as a service RDS product.

You might need to look at specifics for your product but that's generally how it works.

No idea why they want you to use SSO but it turns it on if you want to use this service.

This!

Not sure if Workspaces with their compute/bundle options could work as well they have a lot more power these days

I haven't run a Workspace for ages. I set some up for a group of QAs we had working on a project but haven't used them in maybe 5+ years? (at least pre-covid).

IIRC the Workspaces weren't that cheap though - if you're remotely technical I think servers would be better value. Workspaces are good when you have a temporary team needing similar desktops.

Same, only just started to deploy them again recently.

They don't seem to be that bad now and with an Autostop are handy if you forget or get disconnected

Depends on the juice needed to run something over EC2 and their costs might not outweigh the setup

Ok, so I managed to find a Windows AMI with V-ray and 3DS Max per-installed and ran it in a C5.large instance. Yay! baby steps but at least I've managed to get something running and connect to it via RDP. Unfortunately it was some CLI only version of 3DS Max, probably for building farms with, so not going to be much use initially, but I'll have an ask about on the Thinkbox forums to see if anyone has something.

The instance now says 'terminated', that means I'm not going to keep getting billed for it right? I don't appear to have any EBS volumes either (because I 'terminated' rather than just 'stopped'?)

Terminated means you won't be paying for the instance.

Depending on the settings when you spin it up, you can have EBS volumes set to delete on termination or remain after termination. If you click the "Volumes" link, you would see unattached volumes, if you'd picked the latter option.

You can also look at the Billing menu to see if you're getting charged for anything else.

Having a play around with this stuff again, what's going on here? Quotas, request, vCPU limit of 0.... just take my money!

Worked fine with the free tier t2.micro free tier instance, but that clearly wasn't going cut it with all of the 1Gb RAM getting eaten up just by running windows.

Edit, possibly to do with me trying to use a G4 from reading about, which I guess I don't actually need to build the AMI initially.

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https://towardsthecloud.com/amazon-ec2-requested-more-vcpu-capacity