71–80 of 149 posts
Can anyone give me the advantages of choosing an EC2 dedicated host over going with a true dedicated server?
jeffbarr from Amazon in another thread: > Many of our customers have asked for this feature so that they can run software that is licensed for a particular piece of actual hardware. So it's more aimed at working with/around archaic licensing schemes, rather than technical advantages.
How exactly is this different from Dedicated Instances (which have been around for years)? "Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that run on single-tenant hardware dedicated to a single customer. They are ideal for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations require that your EC2 instances be physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that belong to other customers. Dedicated…
Man, I'd really like to just see bare metal from them. To me that was part of the allure of containers -- so much more efficient than multiple VMs and yet you get a lot of similar benefits, as long as you don't mind some security tradeoffs. Running ECS is cool and all, and I know they do some container-specific VM optimizations, but I still know I'm running a kernel on a kernel, even if my VMs happen to share a host.…
Man, I'd really like to just see bare metal from them. To me that was part of the allure of containers -- so much more efficient than multiple VMs and yet you get a lot of similar benefits, as long as you don't mind some security tradeoffs. Running ECS is cool and all, and I know they do some container-specific VM optimizations, but I still know I'm running a kernel on a kernel, even if my VMs happen to share a host.…
I have run containers on bare metal and in Amazon. Performance can be noticeably slower in Amazon on machines with similar specifications. A detailed explanation why is in this informative video by Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coFIEH3vXPw . It is a talk about how layering containers on top of virtual machines is a recipe for poor performance and wasted resource utilization. He equates it to develope…
> each Dedicated Host can accommodate one or more instances of a particular type, all of which must be the same size
I'm surprised by the "same size" requirement. It seems like even if you ask customers to stay within a single family (m3, m4, etc.) the customer could do their own hand placement of 8 vCPUs next to a pair of 4s...
Edit: Disclaimer, I work on Compute Engine.
No one's mentioned this as a potential use case, so wondering if other people have a way to solve a problem I have...we spin up EC2 instances on the fly for running tests, but some of those require a dedicated IP address to deal with a vendor integration. Seems like a dedicated host might solve that, though perhaps not worth the cost. Is there some other way people solve this problem? We currently have an in-house bo…
1) Have a canned VPC-based test server that's off, and only turned on for the test. VPC-based servers do not lose their IP addresses between activations (though a single server may not suit you)
2) Use AWS internal DNS - have your vendor product use hostnames rather than IPs (if possible), and when you spin up the new machine for testing, switch it's IP into the hostname on the internal DNS zone. Again, you'll need to be VPC-based to use this. You can destroy the instance between runs with this method.
No one's mentioned this as a potential use case, so wondering if other people have a way to solve a problem I have...we spin up EC2 instances on the fly for running tests, but some of those require a dedicated IP address to deal with a vendor integration. Seems like a dedicated host might solve that, though perhaps not worth the cost. Is there some other way people solve this problem? We currently have an in-house bo…
This has the added benefit that if you ever need to spin up more instances to run simultaneously, you don't need to get a new whitelisted IP address.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon offers billing by the hour for those, meaning they probably move between customers a lot more than traditional dedicated servers. A bare-metal user can do lot of bad things unless you trust your hardware manufacturing 100 %, e.g. by messing with the firmware.
At the hardware purchasing level Amazon operates with for AWS hardware, I'm sure they're able to (if they required it) spec custom BIOS requirements that perform integrity verification of subsystems before permitting power up to continue. Whether they do or not is a different question (although I'm sure someone could test this theory).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there any good, dependable, modern alternatives if you don't want to deal with the hardware, and also don't need "scale on demand"? The only name I know is SoftLayer, which is certainly not cheap.
Hetzner.de is a good place to rent a dedicated machine that is fairly configurable.