Amazon EC2 is great, but it can get expensive, especially when you have an army of contractors doing all sorts of different things.
If you’re not careful, you can wind up creeping into a sort of tragedy of the commons situation where nobody shuts down little used EC2 instances because “that’s somebody else’s job” or simply because they’re not sure if anyone is using it. And since amazon bill doesn’t make it easy to see which server did what, let alone who was mostly using which server, it’s hard to formulate a good strategy for beating back the costs.
Here’s a simple, though somewhat radical solution. Prepay cloud developers for EC2 costs and have them use their own amazon accounts. The new improved amazon panel makes it easy to snapshot AMIs, do EBS volume management, and share these resources privately on a per-user basis. Share what you need to share, paypal the developer some funds and let them get on with it.
Suddenly your army of contractors is keeping a much more watchful eye on that EC2 balance because they don’t want to go back to their boss / client to request another prepaid-EC2 cash infusion more often than absolutely necessary.
This isn’t a silver bullet. If you are a fortune 500 company using “enterprise” cloud, you probably don’t want to start encouraging your sysadmins to start expensing basic server costs to their corporate credit card (actually, why not?…. nah). The prepay-EC2 strategy works best where you have a small well defined task that requires an EC2 environment, for example because setup is complicated and/or unautomated, and the developer is a cloudworker type outsourced contractor that wants to get coding with a minimum of friction. I think this approach could also work in a smallish startup environment casual enough that there is a degree of trust but using enouch computing resources that cost is beginning to matter. Prepaid EC2 might be just the trick for keeping the individual team members mindful of costs. I haven’t actually tried this though.
Minor detail: what do you do when the developer does such a good job minding costs that he completes the task far under the prepaid budget? I say, let them keep the excess!
Nota bene: the patch-tag production server is still in linode, and there are no concrete plans to switch to the cloud, though I am kicking the idea around.
