Agreed on EC2 being expensive and slow.
Why I Dislike EC2
11–20 of 191 posts
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#12from comments: op uses softlayer
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#13You 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.
Except that everytime you want to have access to your money you have to go to the bank and line up.
Then randomly the bank won't work, all banks in the region will shut down randomly and you're stuck without money, and you need to pay rent but you can't.
You are invested in certain banks in the region but sometime s it feels like the bank has noisy neighbours, and it takes a while to withdraw money.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#14People 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.
OP. I tried to address that in the post. I'm not sure how to explain it differently. The only reason you need to spin up more instances to handle the load is because of how slow the machines are in the first place. That $750 you spend on 2x m3-xlarges could get you machines that can handle 4x the load (or more). Under normal conditions, you spend $750/m. Under peak, you'll spend $3000/month with EC2 but still $750/m with dedicated (plus it's less to manage).
Also in the post is that for the scenario you're describing, having dedicated servers handle the base traffic and relying on spot instances for the spikes, is much more cost effective.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#15Programmatic access is a big thing, and is what makes EC2, GCE, Rackspace and friends, different from dedicated hosting. (In the case of AWS / GCE, global availability is something else).
Using the Cloud isn't only about instant scaling and per hour billing. Those are useful features, but mostly for specific use cases.
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The Cloud it's about the ability to have software that controls the hardware.
It's about being able to orchestrate automated failovers that provision new servers.
It's about being able to have services that grow and shrink depending on usage.
It's about being able to replace your app servers with data crunching servers at night and relaunch new app servers at day - all transparently.
Of course, those are just a few examples, but the general idea is that programmatic access (APIs) is the big thing. The rest is secondary.
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Is is, however, true that this is not useful to everyone.
On the topic of succeeding using the Cloud, it's indeed difficult. That's why companies are building cloud management tools to help users do this.
Disclaimer: I work for one of these companies.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#16The first letter in EC2 stands for elastic. If you aren't using EC2 for it's elasticity then you're probably doing it wrong. Kind of a no-brainer.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#17On 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'l…
AWS does per-hour billing, so you definitely do not have to commit to a month for on-demand instances.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#18On 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'l…
AWS does per-hour billing, so you definitely do not have to commit to a month for on-demand instances.
I was attempting to point out that you don't need to use EC2 to get shorter than month-to-month billing these days.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#19This 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…
I was shocked when I learned that many EC2 users with highly variable traffic don't spin down during off-peak because sometimes Amazon has problems that prevent them from spinning their instances back up.
I love the idea of their cloud services, but the reality is a decidedly less attractive beast.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#20People 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.
You can get that flexibility without putting your base load on EC2: Use EC2 (or your "normal" hosts cloud services) to spin up extra servers when needed, and host your base load elsewhere. Extra bonus: It allows you to save even more money by flying closer to the wire with your long-term provisioned servers.
These days there are so many hosts that offer combination of colo + dedicated servers + cloud services that you can seamlessly do both even if you don't want to deal with more than one provider.