alt Hacker NewsOutside of the big clouds just buying a 1 Year lease (say) on a dedicated server is so cheap that you'd not be saving much vs spot instances and with spot instances you need code to manage this and you're introducing risk of slowdowns. Probably not worth the trade off.
To illustrate a 128GB ram 20 core server with a 10Gbps NIC and some small SSD storage is probably going to cost you <$2000 USD for a years rental.
They've got usage that plummets 80% 2 days a week and the other 5 have a broad predictable time based pattern where usage drops ~66% judging by graph.
If that works out to same prices as keeping compute at literally your peak requirement level round the clock then something is very wrong somewhere. Maybe that issue is not in-house at blacksmith - perhaps spot pricing is a joke...but something there doesn't check out.
Loads of companies do scaling with much less predictable patterns.
>risk of slowdowns
Yeah you do probably want the scaling to be super conservative...but -80% fluctuation is a comically large gap to not actively scale
>To illustrate
Better view I'd say is: That chart looks like ~4.5 peak. So you're paying for 730 hours of peak capacity and using all of it about 90 hrs.
Given that they wrote a blog about this topic they probably have a good reason for doing it this way. Just doesn't really make sense to me based on given info