ClaimsMarc Andreessen

“Running that same application today in Amazon’s cloud costs about $1,500 a month.”

Marc Andreessen, a16z co-founder, essay author 20 August 2011 Why Software Is Eating the World (a16z) archived copy

Factual Technology

In 2011 running a basic Internet application in Amazon's cloud cost about $1,500 a month.

Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.

Said for an organisation they lead or work for; it counts on both records.

What would count as true or false

The test is whether, in 2011, running a basic Internet application on Amazon Web Services (a small web app with a few servers, storage and modest bandwidth) cost about $1,500 a month. True: AWS pricing in 2011 puts a reasonable basic configuration at roughly $750–$3,000 a month. Mostly true: a reasonable estimate lands somewhat outside that band (roughly $500–$750 or $3,000–$5,000), so the magnitude holds. Mixed: plausible configurations vary so widely that $1,500 is only one of many defensible figures, spanning more than an order of magnitude. Mostly false: typical basic configurations cost several times more or less (about 3–10 times off). False: the cost was an order of magnitude or more different from $1,500.

Set before the research began.

Evidence (6)

  1. E1 March 2011 – the agile admin the agile admin (blog) · 31 March 2011

    “take a normal Large instance you’d use for a database. For a Linux one, it’s $0.34 per hour.”

  2. E2 Cloud economics favor the small workload Computerworld (IDG News Service) · 15 June 2011

    “Such workloads would cost about $10,000 a year to execute in-house, while costing only $1,000 a year in a cloud.”

  3. E3 Cloud economics favor the small workload Computerworld (IDG News Service) · 15 June 2011

    “Over the period of 10 years, however, the costs of the two choices may even out, thanks to the 20% growth rate of the workload.”

  4. E4 amazon – koding notes koding notes (WordPress blog) · 24 January 2014

    “launch your m1.large EC2 instance and Amazon will happily charge you $0.240/hr. In 200 days, that will cost you $1,152. (This is their On-Demand pricing.)”

  5. E5 Extensive Benchmarks Of Amazon's EC2 Compute Cloud Performance Phoronix · 12 January 2011

    “However, that leaves the c1.xlarge, which packs 20 EC2 Compute Units, 7GB of RAM, and nearly 1.7TB of storage for just $0.68 USD per hour.”

  6. E6 Additional Reserved Instance Options for Amazon EC2 | Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services (AWS News Blog) · 1 December 2011

    “Light Utilization Reserved Instances save you up to 33% off the On-Demand price, and just require a $1200 upfront fee.”

Reasoning

The evidence gives 2011 hourly prices for single EC2 instances [E1][E5], but no total monthly cost for a basic application with storage and bandwidth. The only modelled total, about $1,000 a year for a small cloud workload [E2], is far below $1,500 a month. The evidence therefore does not show whether a basic configuration fell within the criteria's $750–$3,000 band.

Cite this claim

Marc Andreessen, “In 2011 running a basic Internet application in Amazon's cloud cost about $1,500 a month.” (said 20 August 2011). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_b4585d75eacb, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_b4585d75eacb

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

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  4. Mostly false Factual 28 May 2017
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  5. Mostly true Factual 28 May 2017
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All of them

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