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Why We Moved Off The Cloud

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Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#71

Post by z2amiller »

tzury wrote: post #32

Facebook's CTO thinks the opposite or perhaps even alike. IMHO, a startup should not start with dedicated, but perhaps when you get to a certain size, perhaps, dedicated hardware, team and bandwidth is the way to go. Just like you will not have a dedicated chef to cook your meal at start, but rather outsource meals, etc. -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12406171 What's the biggest technology mistake you've ever…

I've always thought the "Drive to the datacentre" argument was BS. If you're writing your app for the cloud, you have to deal with spurious instances going away, degrading, etc. It is no different in the datacenter. If you're driving to the datacenter in the middle of the night to replace a disk or a fan, you're doing it just as wrong as if getting evicted from an EC2 instance causes you to have to scramble oncall resources.

In my experience, the highest operational cost with running services is managing the application itself - deployment, scaling, and troubleshooting. None of that goes away with the cloud.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#73

Post by malbiniak »

w1ntermute wrote: post #5

If this trend picks up, there's a good business opportunity if someone comes up with a way to combine the best of the cloud with the best of dedicated hosting.

That's the goal of RackConnect by Rackspace: http://www.rackspace.com/hosting_solutions/hybrid_hosting/

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#74

Post by mwidarto »

jwegan wrote: post #63

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…

If I have to guess, I would guess cost is too high to have rackspace managed dedicated server. I've been working with rackspace's managed dedicated for 10 years. They are pricey but for a small shop where you dont have dedicated network/hardware guy. It's worth every penny. 99% I called their fanatic support, I hear human voice after 1 ring.

Now their cloud support is different story.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#75

Post by lfittl »

endeavor wrote: post #53

I'm surprised no one has mentioned AWS dedicated instances: http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/ 20% more expensive but it seems like the easiest way to fix the problem if you're already on Amazon. That said, I totally agree that Cloud-based IaaS is not a good fit for every situation.

Don't forget the additional $10/hour "region fee" (= $7200/month)

And that dedicated instance is likely still running inside Xen, so you got the normal virtualization overhead, and slow disks.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#76

Post by gpapilion »

Joakal wrote: post #70

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…

Amazon has only recently begun rendering pages via EC2 based images. But, yes, Amazon is not primarily hosted in its cloud.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#77

Post by skeletonjelly »

jedberg wrote: post #66
umjames wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

You've just lost your synergy jedberg.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#78

Post by startupcto »

jedberg wrote: post #66
umjames wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

And you are a cloud expert as per your LinkedIn profile..

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Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#79

Post by blantonl »

charliesome wrote: post #69
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.

100tb.com?

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#80

Post by biot »

krobertson wrote: post #23
larrys wrote: post #16

"You would think that you could get better prices by signing 1 or 2 year contracts, but interestingly enough, out of the initial 5 providers we talked to the two that didn’t require contracts had the best prices." (snip) "We’ve moved 100% of our machines that rely upon performant (sic) disks to dedicated servers hosted at Softlayer. Roughly speaking, this corresponds to about 80% of our hosting costs. Eventually, we’…

There are other aspects of a contract that can be beneficial: SLA, including compensation for outages and outs if they have too many. Sure, without a contract you can leave anytime, but a contract isn't necessarily a permanent trap. They are negociable. You can push for lower incidence allowances, an opt-out part way through the contract, and so on. Support... more in actual human assistance with the move and issues.…

Generally "no contract" means no fixed-term (eg: multi-year) contract. There is always a contract of some sort covering acceptable use, SLA, payment terms, termination rights, and so on. Otherwise you could use as much as you want for any purpose and not pay them a cent and they'd have no recourse. You can even have a contract locking in your price for five years but that you only pay month to month and can leave at any time without penalty.
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