In my previous post, I mentioned that Wowza’s licensing is changing for EC2-based instances. Naturally, this is going to have an effect on how much it costs. I’m going to break down the numbers for a typical church scenario.
The assumptions I’m going to make are based on usage patterns for Resurrection Online:
- 1 full-time server
- 2 services on Sunday, approx. 2 hours each,
- 2 repeaters per service
- 1000GB traffic/month
- US-East zone
Under the current V2 scenario with DevPay, you have the following costs:
- Full-time instance: 720 hours @ 0.15/hr : $108
- Repeaters: 32 hours @ 0.15/hr : $4.80
- Traffic: 1000GB @ $0.15/GB: $150.00
- Wowza AMI Access: $5
Total: $267.80/month
Under V3, it looks like this:
- Full-time instance: 720 hours @ $0.085/hr : $61.20
- Monthly Wowza License: $55
- Monthly nDVR Add-On License: $20
- Repeaters: 32 hours @ $0.085/hr: $2.72
- Daily Wowza License @ $5/day/repeater: $40
- Daily nDVR License @ $2/day/repeater: $16
- Traffic: 1000GB @ $0.12/GB: $120.00
Total: $278.92 ($314.92 with nDVR)
Pretty close… But because V3 is no longer tied to DevPay, you have the freedom of using reserved instances. I’ll assume you won’t do a reserved instance for the repeaters.
- Full-time instance: 720 hours @ $0.03/hr : $21.60
- Monthly Wowza License: $55
- Monthly nDVR License: $20
- Repeaters: 32 hours @ $0.085/hr: $2.72
- Daily Wowza License @ $5/day/repeater: $40
- Daily nDVR License @ $2/day/repeater: $16
- nDVR License:
- Traffic: 1000GB @ $0.12/GB: $120.00
Subtotal: $239.32 ($273.92 with nDVR)
- Reserved instance fee - 1 year: $227.50 ($18.96/month) : $ 258.28
- Reserved instance fee - 3 years : $350 ($9.72/month) : $249.04
Additional repeaters will set you back about $6/day extra ($8 with nDVR)
Summary:
- V2: 267.80/month
- V3: 278.92/month
- V3 (1 year reserved): 258.28/month
- V3 (3 year reserved): 249.04/month
- nDVR on V3 will add $36/month
As you can see, the economics of this have been turned on their ear - now, instead of multiple small servers being the most cost-effective method of doing repeaters, it now makes sense to spin up one or two considerably larger instances for a couple of hours. If each small costs you $5.16 for two hours, and gains you 150Mbps, it looks a lot better to supersize your instance for about 9 bucks for two hours and get several gigabits out of it. When the folks at Wowza get done benchmarking the EC2 instances with V3, I’ll post another entry.