EC2 Dedicated Hosts • Hacker News Board

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#111

Post by laurencerowe » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 5:19 AM UTC

triggercut wrote: post #91

This is great for (warning: potentially limited use case ahead) engineering companies* who run large analysis clusters for specialty Simulation/CFD software. Especially those frustrated by their vendors current or (non-existent) cloud processing offerings. A lot of software in this space, for instance, has a fixed MAC address requirement for their license servers, and you report/pay depending on the number of cores.…

Wouldn't you still see a virtualized network interface with random MAC address from the VM within the dedicated host where the software is running?

You could configure an Elastic Network Interface to have a fixed MAC address, but that would also work without dedicated hosts.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#112

Post by bpicolo » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 5:21 AM UTC

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #84

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #6

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.…

You might want take a look at SoftLayer, they have bare metal servers. However, if you are okay with ARM servers, then I'd suggest taking a look at scaleway, which provide bare metal ARM servers, and they manage it all for you as well.

If you want bare metal for performance, you're not going to get it on a tiny ARM chip

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#113

Post by blantonl » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 5:23 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #57

jeffbarr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is a feature designed for a silly license scheme?

I don't mean this to sound condescending, but you have a lot to learn about software licensing.

There are many software packages that are licensed to an individual peice of hardware. Tied to that are USB authentication dongles, and even parallel port dongles for some old school commercial software.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#114

Post by bdcravens » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 5:32 AM UTC

imaginenore wrote: post #98

That pricing is ridiculous though. I can get 15 Hetzner servers for the price of one EC2.

It's more than a bare metal server - you're still running EC2 instances atop of it, except only your instances are running on that server. Looking at the price of the underlying instances if you run it fully loaded, it seems pretty comparable running those instances non-dedicated.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#115

Post by _urga » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 6:48 AM UTC

I have been with Hetzner since 1999, and I have hosted with AWS for 2 or 3 years, before moving back to Hetzner, and I keep wondering when AWS will have anything to match Hetzner's price/performance.

Someone from AWS proactively called me up out of the blue the other day to ask for input and to interview me about what I need, and offered to quote. I received a phone call or two and two emails and after mentioning the exact specs and price I get from Hetzner, and being genuinely interested in perhaps getting a competitive quote, I waited and received no reply for some time and then the following:

"I'm sorry for my late response. I’ve been pretty busy these days…"

"I had a look at what your technical specifications below and I'd like to understand a bit more what type of business you're doing."

"One of AWS's main strengths lies in the scalability of our platform."

"How much is the % of usage of your dedicated server? What happens if it reaches the maximum usage? At AWS, you can start with smaller instances and use auto-scaling to scale up or down automatically according to your traffic."

"Is scalability a challenge for you?"

There was no quote attached. :)

Hetzner's price/performance is an elephant in the room it seems.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#116

Post by Slartie » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 7:30 AM UTC

_urga wrote: post #115

I have been with Hetzner since 1999, and I have hosted with AWS for 2 or 3 years, before moving back to Hetzner, and I keep wondering when AWS will have anything to match Hetzner's price/performance. Someone from AWS proactively called me up out of the blue the other day to ask for input and to interview me about what I need, and offered to quote. I received a phone call or two and two emails and after mentioning the…

Hehe, I've been using different European-based dedicated server providers (including Hetzner, but also server4you, OVH, Strato) for 10-15 years as well, with varying numbers of servers. All of this happened during the cloud revolution, and I've always been wondering "why would anybody pay these outrageous AWS prices?" - after all, the much-hyped scalability quickly becomes much less relevant if you can practically get 5x-10x the power and traffic in the form of dedicated servers at the same cost, plus the capability of quickly ordering a few more servers (which are automatically allocated to you from a pool of ready-to-use servers, this has been standard practice at dedicated hosting providers for quite some time now) and have them installed in a matter of minutes (provided you've automated your setup process). Sure, you'll have a harder time to get rid of the additional servers, since rentals are typically on a monthly basis, but - did I mention that you'll start with 5x-10x the power anyway, which greatly reduces the need for quick up/downscaling?

Aside from huge customers like Dropbox, which most likely get deep discounts on AWS, I don't see who else could get a better deal out of AWS (or any similar cloud provider) than they would get by directly renting dedicated servers, even considering the much-hyped scalability factor (which most customers probably don't ever end up needing anyway, because...let's face it, there's just so much attention going around on the net, which means there can be just a very limited number of things that "go viral", while there are many, many more services competing for said attention out there). That's at least true for the European market. AFAIK, the US hosting market is a bit different and generally more expensive, so AWS might have a better price point with regard to the competition there.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#117

Post by nitrogen » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 7:35 AM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #56

cstejerean wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are looking at their on-demand rates, which means no commitment. You can do this for a month or even a few days. If you know you will need infra for 1 year or more you can use reserved rates. Right now those are not yet publicly available for Dedicated Instances, although the post mentions you can contact them if you want early access. With reserved rates the price should be 70% less for a 3 year commitment (spec…

But I can still for most things get lower prices on a month by month basis than the price a 3 year commitment to Amazon gets you. And that's before paying their outright extortionate bandwidth prices.

If you have to hire an extra person to manage the new hardware, then you aren't saving money.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#118

Post by res0nat0r » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 7:48 AM UTC

_urga wrote: post #115

I have been with Hetzner since 1999, and I have hosted with AWS for 2 or 3 years, before moving back to Hetzner, and I keep wondering when AWS will have anything to match Hetzner's price/performance. Someone from AWS proactively called me up out of the blue the other day to ask for input and to interview me about what I need, and offered to quote. I received a phone call or two and two emails and after mentioning the…

How do you handle massive traffic spikes? Hetzner seems fine for small project / personal / small company websites with predictable load and people who have no problem spending time setting up all of their services they need themselves, it really just sounds like you just aren't the customer AWS wants to attract.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#119

Post by XorNot » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 8:02 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #103

teraflop wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally the PXE boot code is, itself, stored in firmware.

Whatever components start first, wins. If the PXE boot code is in the NIC, you can theoretically verify the rest of the system first. If its in the BIOS, the BIOS needs to trust the NIC as untrusted/determine if its compromised or not. Security is hard :/

ROM based NIC? Why not? If you're going into large scale dedicated servers, this is not exactly impractical. You could probably also just disconnect the flash enable pins on the ICs.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#120

Post by insertnickname » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 8:12 AM UTC

blantonl wrote: post #113

cortesoft wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it is a feature designed for a silly license scheme?

I don't mean this to sound condescending, but you have a lot to learn about software licensing. There are many software packages that are licensed to an individual peice of hardware. Tied to that are USB authentication dongles, and even parallel port dongles for some old school commercial software.

That sounds like a silly license scheme to me.