EC2 Dedicated Hosts • Hacker News Board

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#141

Post by andrewstuart2 » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 7:36 PM UTC

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #137

toomuchtodo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

If I've paid for the bare metal machine then by definition I already have root on the host machine. Securing that is just as much my problem at that point as is securing my EC2 instances.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#142

Post by andrewstuart2 » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 7:45 PM UTC

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #35

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.…

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.

The security concern you mention (taking over the host) is moot if I've paid for root access to a physical machine (bare metal). By definition I've already paid for the host; there's nothing else to break out of.

SDN could easily be handled by an off-system component. I forget who, but someone who presented at ONS 2015 [1] mentioned the use of FPGAs for this.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhigroIsbIuet0qlIGBQi...

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#143

Post by cortesoft » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 8:47 PM 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.

Yep, you sounded condescending.

I think after 25 years in the industry I know a lot about software licensing. Enough to know that just because lots of software packages are licensed that way doesn't change the fact that they are silly.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#144

Post by nowarninglabel » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 1:18 AM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #63

nowarninglabel wrote: post #60

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…

Yes - its called Elastic IP. You can have a dedicated IP address and associate it on-the-fly to regular EC2 instances. You pay a small monthly fee if you are not actively using it. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-i...

The problem with Elastic IP, from my understanding, was that I often need to spin up say a dozen instances for a short period of time, but otherwise don't need the IPs, so it seemed it would end up costing to have those all available but only temporarily in use...though adding up the cost, it'd only be $45 a month (12 * 0.005 * 24 * 30) so perhaps that's not a big deal.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#145

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 5:41 AM UTC

res0nat0r wrote: post #140

_urga wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#146

Post by iofj » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 6:38 AM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #48

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.

To think of it another way, smaller companies might save money by buying bare metal and renting colo space. But larger companies would spend more just managing the separate bill for the colo, not to mention the logistics of another datacenter.

Given that there is a 10x price difference in some cases, I would doubt this. The bigger a company is, the more sense colo or dedicated makes.

You don't have to manage a datacenter just because you don't go for Amazon. There's tons of companies that will do it for you, at various levels. You want colo space, nothing more ? Fine. You want dedi hosts with a few of your own machines in between ? No problems. On top of that, a lot of dedicated server companies will have spare instance so spinning up new devices is certainly easy enough. Feel free to contact me if you need solutions like this.

I think there's one huge advantage of Amazon : management effectively doesn't get to set policy on the datacenter, so they don't get to screw it up. An internal company department would use something like VMWare and won't let you spin something up without endless approvals, whereas Amazon treats you like a customer.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#147

Post by merb » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 7:25 PM 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 interconnect three nodes without a vpn on hetzner without paying twice as much as on aws? like a private network.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#148

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 25, 2015, 8:35 PM UTC

merb wrote: post #147

_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 interconnect three nodes without a vpn on hetzner without paying twice as much as on aws? like a private network.

[deleted]

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#149

Post by ahofmann » Thu, Nov 26, 2015, 12:03 AM UTC

res0nat0r wrote: post #118

_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.

We handle traffic spikes with having massive overcapacity while still paying _much_ less than at AWS.

In 2008 we started a browsergame that attracted more than 200.000 players. Until 2009 we had to rent big fat servers that could cope with the load and costed over 4000 € per month. Since then hardware got so fast that our PHP software with 500k line of code and 200GB stuff in databases could run on 3-4 dedicated servers that we could rent from almost every german provider for around 300-500 € per month. Since 2014 we have everything on virtual servers hosted by Hosteurope because we wanted managed hosting like AWS and it was even cheaper than running our old dedicated machines. At that time we looked at AWS and we were totally shocked by the prices (we were also shocked how difficult it is to understand the AWS universe)! We're paying less than a tenth for much more performance than we need than we would pay for even the cheapest, 1 year reservation stuff from AWS. Even if our playerbase would triple overnight, our virtual machines would easily cope with that. And upgrading them needs a two clicks and a reboot. Also: we see it as a plus that we have not to deal with all the Amazon stuff, because they have so much APIs, names and complexity in their system. Nobody wants to learn all this and nobody wants to deal with multi-location and replication just because amazon has unreliable servers. German providers seems to have datacenters and servers that don't crash every once in awhile. I'm flabbergasted by how often I read that AWS has broken disks, crashed servers, crashed datacenters, network problems and so on. Since 2008 we had two or three problems in the datacenters at our different providers, with a total downtime of 8 hours. That would be just a little less than 99.99% uptime over all the years... I really wanted to try the new shiny thing that is called AWS but no matter how I looked at it, it is just a very very costly solution for something with built in unreliability.