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Why We Moved Off The Cloud

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Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#61

Post by towelrod »

jedberg wrote: post #46
powertower wrote: post #11

> One last thing about getting dedicated hardware. It's cheaper a lot cheaper. We have machines that give us 2-4x performance that cost less than half as much as their cloud equivalents and we're not even co-locating. I've been saying this for ages, and every time people would fall over backwards trying to defend/prove their cloud mistake... "The cloud is cheaper, faster, and infinitely scalable." Except none of thos…

> The moment a popular site like Reddit switches to the cloud, is the moment it becomes barely usable during certain times of the day. That's completely false. The moment reddit blogged about moving to the cloud, it was * perceived* as being slower. The cloud move happened 7 months before the blog post came out.

I think the OP just meant that once someone like reddit moves into your cloud, your performance goes down. Meaning, the hardware that my little blog is on works great until that hardware also hosting reddit, and then my blog takes a beating because reddit is thrashing away with actual activity.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#62

Post by umjames »

jedberg wrote: post #48

You didn't abandon "the cloud", you just switched providers. You're still paying someone else for servers that you don't own (unless softlayer ships you those machines after 3 years). This is why I hate the term "the cloud" -- because it is too nebulous and non-descriptive.

This is why I hate the term "the cloud" -- because it is too nebulous and non-descriptive.

Actually, nebulous means cloud-like.

Would you prefer the older term "the grid"? They're all just items for buzzword bingo.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#63

Post by jwegan »

Rackspace's primary business is dedicated hosting. In fact they let you have both dedicated hosts and cloud hosts and allow dedicated and cloud hosts to talk to each other.

I'm curious why they didn't just switch to Rackspace's dedicated hosting. It would have given them the performance they needed while retaining the flexibility of being able to quickly spin up cloud machines in the same datacenter as the dedicated machines.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#64

Post by crag »

noodle wrote: post #43
crag wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except of course when that small business relays to much on the cloud. I know a local gym that decided to "host" their cash register. I told the owner it was a mistake. He basically said I was suck in the past. Until his Comcast went/slowed down. Or a local non-profit who's board came up with a great way to save money - host their phone system in the cloud. A local carrier was happy to sign them to a 3 year contact.…

those are examples of people making (or being sold on) poor choices and/or not having all information necessary to make an informed choice. the cloud is not for everyone. physical servers aren't for everyone, either. stories like these don't automatically imply that using the cloud is a bad idea for everyone.

"informed choice"

No, no. It's about price.

Most small business buying subscribing to these services aren't tech. In the phone market (as an example), carriers are selling hosted "solutions" for less then $75 a month. Comcast is too. I like Comcast. But you can't run an office with 25 phones and pc's and other devices on Comcast. At least not in Florida.

The other problem, is most IT firms down here are pushing they own "hosted solutions". Everything from email to accounting services. For cheap.

Now let me be clear some services I think make perfect sense in the cloud. Even with unreliable connectivity. Like email, storage, messaging, But your core business, services you must have to run your business need to remain under your control. Period.

And the last thing; many small business don't really understand just how important IT is to their business.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#65

Post by WALoeIII »

ridruejo wrote: post #30
jbyers wrote: post #21

A factor this post doesn't mention is bandwidth cost. If you use a lot of bandwidth and negotiate competitive hardware pricing, you also save with dedicated hosts. Say you have 10 machines at SoftLayer and use 30TB a month. Each machine comes with 3TB and you pool your bandwidth for $25 per server so you can allocate the whole 30TB to your proxies. It's unknown what fraction of your server cost is applied to bandwidt…

Yes, that is also an issue for us, we provide a large number of downloads (virtual machines, installers) that go into the TB and it would be quite expensive to move that over to EC2. One nice feature of Amazon, if you can afford it, is the ease of use with which you can put that content on their CDN

You can use their CDN (CloudFront) without moving your origin to EC2/S3.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/De...

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#66

Post by jedberg »

umjames wrote: post #62
jedberg wrote: post #48

You didn't abandon "the cloud", you just switched providers. You're still paying someone else for servers that you don't own (unless softlayer ships you those machines after 3 years). This is why I hate the term "the cloud" -- because it is too nebulous and non-descriptive.

This is why I hate the term "the cloud" -- because it is too nebulous and non-descriptive. Actually, nebulous means cloud-like. Would you prefer the older term "the grid"? They're all just items for buzzword bingo.

I hate all the terms because they are all buzzword lingo. :)

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#67

Post by grandalf »

The disk IO problem he mentions might start to go away once SSD drives go into wider use by cloud providers. As far as I can tell, that is his main beef. It's certainly a reasonable complaint.

However the point about pricing is less valid. Cloud hosting providers must invest in lots of extra infrastructure to allow for the flexible provisioning they offer, so any comparison that assumes no need for that flexibility is flawed.

Amazon offers spot instances and various other pricing innovations to help align the customer with Amazon's internal provisioning risk.

I could see Amazon offering lower prices if the user commits to longer term provisioning. This is a simple pricing update that would likely negate any cost advantages of non-cloud services.

The bleeding edge hardware aspect of his argument is valid for some businesses but not likely applicable to most.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#68

Post by callmeed »

It's interesting–I would (and did) choose Rackspace for dedicated hardware over SoftLayer any day.

RS is more expensive but the extra management and support you get is well worth it IMO.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#69

Post by charliesome »

BrandonCWhite wrote: post #51

Thanks for this post. I currently own/run a niche social networking site with a little over 60,500 registered users and see several thousand users on the site at a time. I bought my own servers co-locate them in a large hosting facility in northern Virginia. The initial costs were the hardware, of course you can lease it if you want which can be cheaper if you intend to upgrade existing servers on a yearly basis. We…

Yes, bandwidth is dirt cheap on a dedicated box.

I run a service that constantly pushes over 90mbps over the wire (about 30TB a month) and I pay just over $100 a month for two servers. The same bandwidth usage on EC2 (or any other 'cloud' provider for that matter) would cost me thousands.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#70

Post by Joakal »

Interesting Rackspace leaving post:

"Rackspace Cloud has had pretty atrocious uptime over the year there has been two major outages where half the internet broke. Everyone has their problems but the main issue is we see really bad node degradation all the time. We’ve had months where a node in our system went down every single week. Fortunately, we’ve always built in the proper redundancy to handle this. We know this will happen Amazon too from time to time but we feel more confident about Amazon’s ability to manage this since they also rely on AWS."

There was some statements from Amazon employees that Amazon isn't hosted on AWS.

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