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EC2 Dedicated Hosts

aws.amazon.com

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Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#131

Post by LoSboccacc »

ownagefool wrote: post #129
LoSboccacc wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. precisely. this is the other elephant in the AWS room. the only way to survive a spike without service degradation while vm spin up on that platform is through lambdas/s3 served pages/api gateway - but even lambdas lag behind traffic. but then you need to build your whole architecture for it anyway I'm running on AWS right now, but f…

Baking your images and set your scaling thresholds lower should be able to largely deal with that. The thing is though, the scaling is nice but most folks just want the auto-recovery. You stick your app over 3 zones, you have autoscaling and you can run with a couple of Ops savy devs and largely forget about it. You no longer need to pay for that dedicated sysadmin who knows how to manage a datacentre when have a sma…

precisely. recoverable multi zone postgres without paying a sysadmin. we can manage basic maintenance on our own, but setting up something like that require a skilled consultant in short burst at each upgrade/maintenance check, and for a small operation like ours it's too expensive if we want to match what amazon gives.

we do have a custom AMI that just fetch and build the latest snapshot release when we need auto-scaling or auto-recovery, but our real problem is that we currently depend on sticky session, so users accumulated on the initial instances get sucky performances. (and yes we are currently working on fixing it, we cannot outright serialize sessions on dynamo because, reasons)

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#132

Post by imaginenore »

bdcravens wrote: post #114
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.

So? It's still ridiculously expensive.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#133

Post by brianwawok »

dsr_ wrote: post #45
brianwawok wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the license of the software you want to run is 100k per physical host? Then being able to run 2 or 4 instances on the same physical host makes the $2226 cost pretty insignificant.

If you have software that costs that much, you will want to run it on hardware optimized for that software. (Does it want lots of GPU cores? I/O? Raw computrons? Does it prefer more cores or more GHz/core?) Unless Amazon happens to have exactly what you want available, you'll be better off putting it in a lab or datacenter.

Maybe, maybe not. Just because software cost a lot does not mean it is super high performance. Some is awful php strung together hacks, but if it does what a customer wants - it may be worth 100k to them.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#134

Post by idlewords »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #107
idlewords wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe they do. If you want a US datacenter, consider LeaseWeb. They're a Dutch company but offer servers in DC and San Jose.

Looks alright, but their server selection is a bit limited (and hard to navigate, just a big list that doesn't even filter properly). For example, if I want 128GB RAM and SSD disks, their prices suddenly go up to thousands of dollars per month because they're all some kind of beefy Dell or HP, whereas Hetzner can give me a single-processor, 6-core Xeon E5-1650 3.4GHz + 128GB RAM + 960GB SSD for $123/mo. LeaseWeb has…

I thought we were talking about "where do I get a dedicated server"? If you're serious about moving your entire infrastructure onto dedicated hosting, you have to pick up the phone and negotiate a deal. The off-the-shelf options are pretty limited, as you point out.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#135

Post by res0nat0r »

_urga wrote: post #121
res0nat0r wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"How do you handle massive traffic spikes?" Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin with. If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest…

This sounds like it goes back to my comment in that you aren't AWS' target customer in that you are fine with a bare bones provider and setting up handling all of this yourself.

It's shown that many people want all of this outsourced for them and will pay a premium to do so. I always find it a bit silly that every time an AWS service is announced it is compared to some bare minimum other provider that is out there that is cheaper. Of course it is going to be cheaper, but that really is irrelevant.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#136

Post by [deleted] »

dsr_ wrote: post #45
brianwawok wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the license of the software you want to run is 100k per physical host? Then being able to run 2 or 4 instances on the same physical host makes the $2226 cost pretty insignificant.

If you have software that costs that much, you will want to run it on hardware optimized for that software. (Does it want lots of GPU cores? I/O? Raw computrons? Does it prefer more cores or more GHz/core?) Unless Amazon happens to have exactly what you want available, you'll be better off putting it in a lab or datacenter.

[deleted]

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#137

Post by omarforgotpwd »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #42
omarforgotpwd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure Amazon would love it too (think about how much money they could save / make) but there are a lot of security concerns that need to be addressed. Running code in a virtualized kernel is a lot more secure than running in the real kernel with permissions limited. Theoretically an exploit could allow someone to take over the machine, whereas if the machine is virtualized it's much harder to take over the host.

Doesn't matter if the machine is taken over if its properly contained at the network level. Dedicated server hosting companies have been doing this for years .

It definitely does matter if the host machine is taken over... an attacker could access other customer instances, shut down the system to try and shut down EC2, etc..

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#138

Post by lobster_johnson »

idlewords wrote: post #134
lobster_johnson wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks alright, but their server selection is a bit limited (and hard to navigate, just a big list that doesn't even filter properly). For example, if I want 128GB RAM and SSD disks, their prices suddenly go up to thousands of dollars per month because they're all some kind of beefy Dell or HP, whereas Hetzner can give me a single-processor, 6-core Xeon E5-1650 3.4GHz + 128GB RAM + 960GB SSD for $123/mo. LeaseWeb has…

I thought we were talking about "where do I get a dedicated server"? If you're serious about moving your entire infrastructure onto dedicated hosting, you have to pick up the phone and negotiate a deal. The off-the-shelf options are pretty limited, as you point out.

Is that entirely true, though? I'm too small a fish to be in the position to negotiate much. And besides, at my scale, there's no reason "negotiation" can't be expressed as simple mechanical rules (fixed-length contracts, volume discounts, usage tiers, etc.). Off the shelf is what I want, not some bullshit corporate sales thing.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#139

Post by _urga »

res0nat0r wrote: post #135
_urga wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How do you handle massive traffic spikes?" Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin with. If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest…

This sounds like it goes back to my comment in that you aren't AWS' target customer in that you are fine with a bare bones provider and setting up handling all of this yourself. It's shown that many people want all of this outsourced for them and will pay a premium to do so. I always find it a bit silly that every time an AWS service is announced it is compared to some bare minimum other provider that is out there th…

No, the context here was "EC2 Dedicated Hosts" and pinned VMs vs dedicated servers, which is a fair comparison. Or were you actually speaking about things like S3 or WorkMail and traffic spikes related to those?

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#140

Post by res0nat0r »

_urga wrote: post #139
res0nat0r wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like it goes back to my comment in that you aren't AWS' target customer in that you are fine with a bare bones provider and setting up handling all of this yourself. It's shown that many people want all of this outsourced for them and will pay a premium to do so. I always find it a bit silly that every time an AWS service is announced it is compared to some bare minimum other provider that is out there th…

No, the context here was "EC2 Dedicated Hosts" and pinned VMs vs dedicated servers, which is a fair comparison. Or were you actually speaking about things like S3 or WorkMail and traffic spikes related to those?

People pay a premium for the currently 50+ other integrated services in the AWS ecosystem they can leverage vs. spending time and money doing it themselves if they went with another provider, dedicated hosts are no different re: pricing.
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