AWS mistakes to avoid
261–270 of 276 posts
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS is insanely overpriced. It's weird to me that everyone jumping on AWS and some of their customers never come close to attracting the internet traffic required to set up CloudFormation. I think if you're starting a webapp out of your own pocket and not millions of dollars of investors, it makes sense to save where you can. Using locust.io, I've seen that my current site on two $10/month Linodes can scale up to app…
You're right, but I know of a few startup teams that chose Linode, Rackspace etc. at start to account for future 'scalability' concerns. Well the number of users never came and they spent a lot of time just configuring stuff. Of course I have also seen teams that couldn't build a decent business on AWS. I think the net cost of an extra personnel (a server admin) in a startup team, is more than the cost of the server.
If anything, I see a lot of people choose AWS for 'scalability' concerns when they never end up needing to scale.
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the reasons to go with AWS as a major strategic decision are to avoid paying for 3-4 (or perhaps... 40+) ops engineers to run and manage so many things that really don't add much business value in themselves and that you could hold to some form of an SLA (especially with enterprise support accounts) and recoup some costs if things came down to it. Furthermore, engineering a lot of AWS services would cost you…
"I've seen executives file AWS support requests to reboot VMs at 3 am" Isn't this falls outside amazon's responsibly area? Atleast the documentation I read and a few aws promotional talks I attended seems to suggest the contrary. Or I have understood completely wrong and amazon is now also providing managed IT services?
But when you pay AWS so much they are pretty beholden to your requests and can wind up becoming a lot like an MSP. I've spent countless hours with those poor guys waiting on a traceroute failure or for mtr or sat to give some anomalous event that everyone suspects is something wrong in AWS when I've insisted AWS is almost never at fault because our incompetence is almost certainly the problem.
The AWS support team's worst engineer is probably at least in the top 25% of our support engineers I'd argue so I'm sure if my customer had the option they'd want to pay to have them troubleshoot our own internal networks but that's what my team is for I guess.
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on which services, but for simpler services with well understood open source equivalents (e.g. route53 and BIND) you can probably manage two per sysadmin at a similar quality to AWS with a basic API. For something like RDS or Redshift, if you're very lucky you'll get away with one sysadmin per service. This covers not just running the services, but keeping up to date with security updates, scaling the syst…
"Something like Cloudfront would cost you a million just to get going." We've used CDNs in the past, way below a million/year for a medium, growing startup. care to elaborate?
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#265Hmm... Then maybe the biggest problem with them is actually that they are misnamed?
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#266I like CloudFormation. Unfortunately it is very unwieldy to write CloudFormation templates directly, and we're not about to start using the AWS CFN GUI editor! It seems like the assembly of the AWS ecosystem. Does anyone else have a favourite hammer for this particular nail? I'd love to have something better than our home-baked solution, but I'm yet to find anything which doesn't introduce other flaws, such as an inc…
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The cost benefits get better the more incompetent / incapable your internal IT organization is. " Yes. There will always be a less stupid solution out there that is not as bad as the bad solution. Or, you could fix IT. But that takes thought. Easier to give money to a vendor you can blame...?
Fixing completely dysfunctional F500 IT organizations is something that many, many people have tried across completely different company cultures with maybe a handful of successes I've heard of. Leading huge organizations (especially ones damaged by previously failed leadership efforts - think how attempts to refactor a legacy codebase go and multiply by an order magnitude in number of variables) is very hard and bec…
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Cloud is not just App Engine now. Its pretty much the equivalent to aws in features. Let me also say I have PhD in Cloud and big data (graduated in 2013), worked for Amazon aws, worked for an rackspace for year and half, I was a core contributor to OpenStqck for the products OpenStack Poppy and OpenStack Zaqar. I hope you his puts se more weight behind my statements. If you are interested to know the details a…
They aren't even close to each other in featuers. All the various additional Services AWS supports go way beyond what Google has at the moment. Numerous Database offerings, Queueing, transcoder, ... Go way beyond what Google has in place. And no the ability to run it yourself on Google is not the same.
Here's a material answer - https://cloud.google.com/docs/google-cloud-platform-for-aws-...
In short, Google has parity with AWS on many fronts, and exceeds AWS on many others. Only material AWS advantage at this point is full IAM. Biggest thing you gotta remember is AWS is stuck in "VM" world and only slightly deviates from that. Google's advantage is in its fully managed services, which AWS does poorly (don't tell me Redshift is "fully managed").
Google has Bigtable, which AWS has no competitor for. Google's Pubsub is vastly superior to SQS. Google doesn't need Firehose because Google's services scale to Firehose levels without needing a new product and a new price. Google has Zync transcoder service.
Google has BigQuery, which is vastly superior to Redshift in price, performance, scale, and manageability. Google has Dataflow, which AWS has no competitor for.
Even for VMs, Google offers better networking, faster disks, more reliability (live migration), better load balancer, etc.
And to put the cherry on top, Google's no-committment, no-contract price is only beat if you lock yourself into AWS's 3-year contract.
(disclaimer: work on BigQuery)
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is super important - I've run a number of 'oversized' instances just to get better networking. AFAIK none of the cloud providers offer a way to create a 'network' optimized instance, though containerized deployments should help with under utilizing the rest of the instance.
This was a big issue for me too. Google Compute Engine seems to have no throttling like AWS does, or at least it's a much higher cap. On an n1-standard-1 I routinely get 250+ MB/s, and near 1 GB/s for n1-standard-4 and larger. The only high bandwidth AWS instances I've found are the few expensive ones that spec 10 Gbit.
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/11/bringing-you...
Re: AWS mistakes to avoid
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is categorically false. If you have large capacity needs talk to your TAMs/Account Manager and they can make it happen.
It's been true five times in the last three years for me. The elasticity isn't always there and service limits are not always granted when needed. I don't know what an AWS TAM is but the SAs have tried and failed. Make a new account and try to run 1000 c4.4xl in parallel for 1 hour. It won't happen. That's not what happened the five times, but it's illustrative. And who defines what is a need and what is a want?