Earlier quoted context omitted.
Umm, does linode offer higher level services like SQS, Lambda, SWF and friends?
Their open source alternatives running on Linux?
Because ops is free.
AWS mistakes to avoid
151–160 of 276 posts
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#152I'd like to add, if using Elastic Beanstalk, don't directly attach an RDS instance when creating the environment. If you do, you won't be able to destroy your environment without also deleting the RDS instance. Instead, create the RDS instance separately, and just add the proper security group for the environment to be able to access the host. Then you can easily create a new eb environment with any config changes (t…
interesting. i was under the impression you could just create a snapshot (before destroying the environment) and then restore as needed. am i missing something? Edit: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_R...
If you can take the database instance offline and if you do not need to access it from outside of the beanstalk app then that is fine.
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#153Full disclosure: I work for Linode and I am super biased. This is my own opinion etc etc Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even before I started at Linode, I thought it was terrible. It's extremely, unreasonably pricey. The UI is terrible. Their offerings are availble elsewhere. I started MediaCrush, a now-defunct media hosting website, on AWS. After a while, we switched to dedicated hosti…
Linode offers the equivalent of a tiny, tiny subset of AWS. I haven't looked recently, but do they have something equivalent to SQS? Autoscaling groups? DynamoDB? SES? Cloudwatch? If you are going to end up re-building AWS's services from scratch on top of what are essentially naked linux machines (or doing your integration work between services from many vendors), you are doing a huge amount of work that isn't neces…
Or even VPC. I'd like to be able to run a small Kubernetes cluster on Linode at some point, but I'm not sure I'd want to run it without a VPC.
I'm involved in two different startups, one on Linode (because that's all it can afford) and the other on AWS. For it's current offering, Linode is great for MVPs, and you like your servers as pets, but it's doubtful we'd stay with Linode once we start having to scale.
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#154Full disclosure: I work for Linode and I am super biased. This is my own opinion etc etc Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even before I started at Linode, I thought it was terrible. It's extremely, unreasonably pricey. The UI is terrible. Their offerings are availble elsewhere. I started MediaCrush, a now-defunct media hosting website, on AWS. After a while, we switched to dedicated hosti…
We started with Linode. We moved to AWS. Here's the main reason: you can't decouple disk space from RAM. So we paid thru the nose just to get more disk space. With AWS it's pay for what you need. That's the killer feature for us.
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely agree that better tutorials and/or a simpler interface would makes AWS more accessible and user friendly. A YC S15 startup, Convox ( http://convox.com/ ), aims to "make AWS as easy as using Heroku." It looks really promising.
There are also quite a few Ansible core modules for EC2 if you're looking for a uniform way to manage your resources outside of the AWS GUI, although to be honest I'm not sure if that's "easier" so much as more flexible. Still solves the problem with mistake #1.
Would recommend Terraform here - https://terraform.io/
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#156Full disclosure: I work for Linode and I am super biased. This is my own opinion etc etc Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even before I started at Linode, I thought it was terrible. It's extremely, unreasonably pricey. The UI is terrible. Their offerings are availble elsewhere. I started MediaCrush, a now-defunct media hosting website, on AWS. After a while, we switched to dedicated hosti…
As neither a AWS or Linode customer (but might become one) I have a couple questions: - Can Linode offer short-term compute or memory intensive service? e.g., If I want to consume 100 teraflops 24x7 for about a couple weeks, or maybe 10 teraflops but a terabyte of memory. (Pay-as-you-go, not monthly/yearly subscription) - On top of that, Can I do above with my IPython notebook code, which is already setup (it uses nu…
Good luck trying to get huge capacity from AWS with no history.
Their service limits start low and ratchet slowly, if they have the capacity to give.
All these features and elasticity sound nice until you get big and they don't deliver.
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you'd consider something other than CloudFormation, there is also Hashicorp's Terraform. It has an AWS provider ( https://terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/index.html ) which creates resources and maintains the state in a file that you can store in version control ( https://terraform.io/docs/state/index.html ).
Strongly agree. Support for new AWS features hits Terraform much faster than CloudFormation (still waiting for CF support for AWS's managed ElasticSearch service that was unveiled two months ago--Terraform got it right away). Some of the critiques below are true... HCL is fine, but Terraform's interpolation syntax has a long way to go. That said, CF's JSON is way more painful to deal with. As for the other problems,…
I'm a big Terraform fan, but I really don't like HCL and its limitations. I ended up writing a PHP "SDK" of sorts that generates JSON that Terraform consumes [1]. It uses the AWS SDK for some things (like listing all available AZs in a VPC), and provides some macros. I made this for use at work, and it powers a few production sites for a large company.
There's still a lot to do to make it ideal for public consumption (like writing docs and freezing the API), but it'll get there sometime soon. PRs are most welcome.
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#158Has anyone tried the Trusted Advisor feature out? Have you found it worth the 3-10% on top of existing monthly usage?
If you already have a support plan, it's free. So yes, I have. Nothing useful so far, but I plan to keep checking it periodically in case I'm off my game.
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#159Use OpsWorks if possible. It's free and provides a simple interface that allows you to deploy/upgrade your apps automatically and monitors your instances automatically using CloudWatch.
+1. AWS has done an amazing job with OpsWorks. It's free Chef 12. What's not to love? (The only drawback I've noticed so far is some standard Chef stuff--vault in particular--not working. Other than that, very pleased.)
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
As neither a AWS or Linode customer (but might become one) I have a couple questions: - Can Linode offer short-term compute or memory intensive service? e.g., If I want to consume 100 teraflops 24x7 for about a couple weeks, or maybe 10 teraflops but a terabyte of memory. (Pay-as-you-go, not monthly/yearly subscription) - On top of that, Can I do above with my IPython notebook code, which is already setup (it uses nu…
Good luck trying to get huge capacity from AWS with no history. Their service limits start low and ratchet slowly, if they have the capacity to give. All these features and elasticity sound nice until you get big and they don't deliver.
This is categorically false. If you have large capacity needs talk to your TAMs/Account Manager and they can make it happen.