I was running some numbers trying to figure out which would be the better solution between using EBS volumes on the web front ends for logging versus using something like scribe. In either case the log data would end up in a database for analytics.
In my mind the choice is pretty dead simple, however, I've recently run into a case where and admin had put together the most bizarre little hack for dealing with logging data. They were writing the log data to an attached volume, then reading the data off the volume with a series of nearly indecipherable spaghetti code written entirely in bash. This meant that the web front end were horribly bloated with all of this extra work, not to mention the sheer fragility of it all.
At any rate, I was thinking about how much this is costing them to do as opposed to doing something more elegant like using Scribe...
Assuming 10 web servers taking an average rate of 5 hits per second, and assuming that each hit is logged to an EBS volume, then read from the same volume later on into a database:
5 hps * 10 servers = 50 hps
50 writes and 50 reads = 100 total IO operations per second.
360,000 ops/hr = 8,640,000 ops/day
Amazon charges $0.10 per 1M operations, so that works out to $0.664 / day = $25.92 per month.
So, at the end of the day they end up spending a very small amount for this. Even if you piled the expense of the web server instances themselves it probably won't add up to much more then $50/month. That's not bad at all, but it's still %50/month they don't have to be spending when they could be getting a better service for free. Call me overly pedantic, but I just hate spending money I don't have to, especially when I have a lot riding on a newly funded startup. Every penny counts right?
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