Why I Dislike EC2
openmymind.net
Why I Dislike EC2
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Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#2People use EC2 not because of price but flexibility. A good example: When we launch a product and expect lots of traffic, i can quadruple my server count in a few minutes. Once the event is over with, i can spin them down. I can't do this with traditional hosting.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#3These are appropriate considerations to have; and the concerns about performance are very well-founded.
Nonetheless, the values I see in EC2 and AWS come in the API, role management, and the centralization of services. Being able to automate everything is outstanding (even if many of the APIs feel very young). Allowing anyone in the organization access to the management console with appropriate privileges is helpful, and something that I haven't seen available from other providers - at least not with the level of customization that AWS provides. Also, knowing that just about everything is handled in one place makes things easier logistically - it's small overhead, but managing DNS and CDN and Hosting all in the same interface is convenient.
Hosting decisions must be made on a case by case basis; but it's wrong to avoid EC2 (and AWS) simply because you can get better performing servers elsewhere at a lower cost per time period.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#4On top of paying 8x what it cost before/after I moved from/back to Softlayer, AWS services just didn't work right. EBS failed often. RDS, which runs on top of EBS, would fail often too. When an entire AZ failed, despite paying double the hourly rate for "Multi-AZ" instances that were supposed to automatically fail over to another zone, nothing failed over, it just failed.
If I need on-demand instances these days, I'll do it at Linode. They bill to the day, so you don't need to commit to a month for temporary instances. It's not as scriptable, but it works and doesn't cost a fortune over renting hardware either. More often, I just get servers with more CPU cores and more RAM than I need so there's plenty of room to absorb spikes.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#5You pay for convenience. Saying EC2 is slower is like noticing that you have to wait in line at the bank: yea it's slower than just stuffing cash under your mattress, but you don't have to worry about it being stolen, either.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#6This article pretty much reflects my experience with EC2. EC2 makes it very easy way to get started with things when you're figuring stuff out and don't have a great deal of experience in managing servers and machines. You don't have to deal with RAID, power outages, etc. and can literally treat hardware like software.
But once you get up and running, you will realize that this comes with a great cost. EC2 absolutely sucks in terms of raw performance. I also notice variation in performance of machines on different times of the day, and between machines.
Amazon has done a great job at selling "the cloud", and I can see many CXOs buying into that. But the fact is, renting dedicated machines from a good provider isn't exactly that hard. They take care of a lot of things for you.
EC2 is good if you have wildly varying amounts of traffic such that you need to really have that kind of elasticity in your infrastructure. However, for most businesses, especially web apps, that's not the case.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#7I agree with the author, EC2 seems really expensive compared to other clouds. One of the comments suggested DigitalOcean, which has much better pricing, and you can do flexible by the hour pricing and it has a rest API to bring up/down servers.
/shameless shill + happy DO customer
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#8People use EC2 not because of price but flexibility. A good example: When we launch a product and expect lots of traffic, i can quadruple my server count in a few minutes. Once the event is over with, i can spin them down. I can't do this with traditional hosting.
I agree with that but things are getting better. Providers like Internap exists now which has "instantly provisioned" dedicated hardware and a hosting API (http://www.internap.com/agile/). I personally have not had experience with them but from I can see it seems to be good.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#9People use EC2 not because of price but flexibility. A good example: When we launch a product and expect lots of traffic, i can quadruple my server count in a few minutes. Once the event is over with, i can spin them down. I can't do this with traditional hosting.
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Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#10This article pretty much reflects my experience with EC2. EC2 makes it very easy way to get started with things when you're figuring stuff out and don't have a great deal of experience in managing servers and machines. You don't have to deal with RAID, power outages, etc. and can literally treat hardware like software. But once you get up and running, you will realize that this comes with a great cost. EC2 absolutely…
operations is hard, let's go shopping!