AWS Services
Most of our business in the last year came from hosted AWS solutions, with businesses aiming to save costs as they enjoyed continued growth in their production environment that was demanding more compute, more storage, and more bandwidth.
AWS is a tool that, used correctly, offers benefits for massively scalable applications – but are you Netflix?
Free credits for development are essential for every start-up and for rapid innovation. But once an application enters production and the platform has predictable workloads and grows beyond a few instances, a few GB of storage and, crucially, a few GB of bandwidth, the premium charged for highly scalable workloads can skyrocket. The premium for flexibility can cripple businesses’ cash generation for further re-investment.
For varied yet stable workloads or predictable fluctuations, the premium of AWS’ flexibility is a crutch for cash flow and is no longer suitable – all platforms should be architected for portability of workloads to match workloads effectively.
Use AWS for the part of your application that needs it, but not for the parts that don’t.
Hybrid is the Answer
Have your cake and eat it – the best of both worlds is a possibility. With direct connections to public clouds such as AWS and Azure, we already have the infrastructure setup for you to build an application that has the right workload in the right environment.
Choosing a hybrid cloud solution enables you to benefit from the ability to cater for highly variable workloads in the public cloud, and save costs by right-sizing performance in a private cloud environment for the always-on, lower variable workloads.
Use our certified public cloud architects, sysops and devops teams to help architect the right multi-cloud, agnostic solution for your needs now and in the future.
How AWS Costs Can Grow
The principles at the heart of AWS pricing are: pay only for what you use and start or stop using any service at any time. This flexibility comes at a premium – you pay more per hour on AWS than with a bare metal server – even with a reserved instance.
While this lowers costs when utilisation is sporadic or when you can switch off large portions of your infrastructure, this doesn’t reflect the majority of workloads for live production environments in mature businesses.
The portion of a mature business’s infrastructure that has to be ‘always on’ will grow, as does the amount of storage used and the volume of data being transferred. Under these circumstances, AWS costs will balloon relative to our solutions. Choose the right tool for the application.
How Do We Compare?
Let’s look at the cost of a simple AWS instance to see how Redstation’s bare metal cloud compares:
As you can see, the cost of always on, dedicated resources on AWS is more than 4x the equivalent cost with Redstation. If you currently have a sizeable AWS bill, don’t hesitate to get in touch so that we calculate the saving of migrating appropriate workloads to our bare metal cloud.
*prices correct at the time of writing.
- AWS
- I2.4xlarge
- 16 core
- 122GB
- 4x800GB SSD
- Linux
- 1Gb network
£1,830.20* per month
- Redstation
- D10.620
- 16 core
- 128GB
- 4x1TB SSD
- Linux
- 1Gb network
£441.99* per month
Migration Support
If the time has come to analyse and look to migrate some of your workload from AWS to dedicated servers, our AWS certified engineers are here to help you.
If your application has been written to be dependent upon the underlying technology in AWS, do not fear – we have experience in working with developers to unpick the areas that are tied to AWS to provide you with a completely agnostic cloud solution. Pick up and move your entire environment between clouds as a DR plan, rather than running both simultaneously – if it’s good enough for Government, it’ll be good enough for most.
