Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts: Pros And Cons
If you're a bit confused by what a dedicated host cloud service can do for you, rest assured you're not alone. We'll help you figure out when your IT department should choose to deploy dedicated hosts.
Amazon touts its latest Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering -- EC2 Dedicated Hosts -- as a "physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use." The offering is about as close as you can get to running bare-metal servers, yet still be in a virtualized environment.
The addition of dedicated hosts to Amazon's cloud services offerings marks an effort by the company to reach enterprise clients. Amazon has long been the environment in which to launch applications that represented a new generation. These apps were cloud-oriented and followed the rules of a cloud environment, scaling out over many servers as demand for them grew.
However, organizations looking to migrate legacy software licenses, and those operating in heavily regulated environments, typically require a greater level of control than most cloud services can offer.
[The struggle is real. Read 8 Reasons IT Pros Hate the Cloud.]
If you're a bit confused by what a dedicated host cloud service can do for you, rest assured that you’re not alone. We'll help you figure out when your IT department might choose to deploy dedicated hosts in your cloud environment. We'll also look at the pros and cons of dedicated hosts versus other offerings.
While we look specifically at Amazon’s EC2 Dedicated Host offering, you'll find many of the pros and cons we focus on here will be the same when you're considering similar solutions from other service providers. We'll get to the core of why you might choose dedicated hosts over other cloud offerings, and give you a view of the drawbacks you might encounter if you choose this route.
Once you've reviewed our guidance here, we'd love to hear your opinions. Is a dedicated host something you've been waiting for, and desperately need, from your cloud service provider? Or will the negative aspects of the services deter you from using them? Tell us all about it in the comments section below.
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One of the biggest drawbacks of most cloud offerings is that IT cedes control to the cloud service provider, thus losing the visibility necessary for solving complex performance and reliability issues you may encounter. Dedicated hosts resolve these concerns and let you control the number of instances that are placed on a physical server host.
When you deploy a dedicated host, you must also specify an instance type. The type of instance specifies things such as server CPU, RAM, storage, and bandwidth requirements. The instance type must be uniform across the host. In other words, if you deploy half a dozen different instances on the host, the instance configuration settings must be identical on all six. You can only choose one.
Legacy software licenses are based on how many server sockets or CPUs the software is being run on. Dedicated hosts launched specifically for your use allow you to migrate such volume licensing to the cloud. Additionally, software licensing models for Microsoft Windows Server or Oracle databases -- which often require software to run on the same server hardware for the length of the license -- are good fits for dedicated host deployments in the cloud.
Unlike standard cloud instances, dedicated hosts on AWS offer a narrow list of machine images you can deploy. This list includes Bring Your Own Licensing (BOYL), Amazon Linux, and AWS Marketplace AMIs. If you need to launch anything else, a dedicated host isn't for you.
In some situations, businesses have been unable to migrate to the cloud because of regulatory and compliance rules, which require tight control and visibility of physical hosts. With a dedicated host cloud model, these requirements can be satisfied.
Once you spin up a dedicated host, you pay for it, regardless of whether it has zero, one, or a dozen instances running on it. In general, the cost to run instances on dedicated hosts, which give you a greater level of control, is higher than it is for other cloud services. If you don't need the level of control afforded by dedicated hosts, save your money.
If you use dedicated hosts and bring your own licensing (BYOL), Amazon includes reporting tools to help keep track of licensing usage. They add up to a nice bonus when migrating from a private deployment, which many not have such granularity in license tracking and reporting functions.
Using dedicated hosts in a cloud environment isn't for everyone. But if you need to migrate legacy software that you were previously unable to move due to licensing, regulatory, or visibility concerns, it's a valid choice. For the rest of us, it's nice to know we have yet another cloud deployment tool at our disposal.
Using dedicated hosts in a cloud environment isn't for everyone. But if you need to migrate legacy software that you were previously unable to move due to licensing, regulatory, or visibility concerns, it's a valid choice. For the rest of us, it's nice to know we have yet another cloud deployment tool at our disposal.
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