You really can't beat it for the first year, though ;)
Why I Dislike EC2
21–30 of 191 posts
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#22People 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…
The main issue with the hybrid approach is devops cost. you will be basically dealing with two very different infrastructures, and building the ops for such a hybrid system could be costly (in money and time). Taking this into account, the money you save shrinks, In addition, a more complex system most likely has more parts to fail as well, so your total reliability might suffer somewhat as well.
Another thing to take into account is inter-datacenter network reliability. I have personally ran a hybrid system (dedicated + EC2) before and suffered a routing issue. The upstream provider for the data center that my dedicated machines were in suffered a routing outage to EC2 US-East region (or at least to the AZs that my instances were in), and my EC2 web app servers could not connect to my DB for around 10 hours (during the day time too). If you have a hybrid system, during peak hours (where you have lots of EC2 spot instances serving traffic), networking issues could result in unexpected downtime. This is of course, in addition to the regular SLA downtime you get from either the dedicated provider or AWS, which is not an issue if you have everything hosted together, but could become an unavoidable problem if not.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#23At Scribd we initially used EC2 for systems like converting uploaded documents to HTML5 (the capacity we needed varied a lot over short time spans due to things like variable API usage). Meanwhile, the app and web servers (and many others) lived at Softlayer (still the "best-looking horse at the glue factory" for managed hosting, IMHO).
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
OK I see. But then why not EC2 with per-hour billing?
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#25I'm trying to figure out where this niche is that EC2 is more expensive than traditional hosting on a price/performance basis and I'm drawing a blank. Yes, they're vastly more expensive than the sticker price on a server (assuming you can size out your server needs years in advance), but most of the cost of running a realistic server are elsewhere, housing/power/cooling, NAS, networking, licences, manpower, spares, security, monitoring... The actual per-hour fees aren't really the top consideration for choosing among the alternatives and AWS is at least competitive on a TCO basis.
The only things I get a big price/performance advantage over AWS for are things I might as well host on my desk, and even there it's dicey.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#26Programmatic 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. -- The Cloud it's about the ability to have software that controls the hardware. It's about being a…
You can orchestrate automated failovers that provisions new servers even if you have dedicated servers to handle your base load. And the price difference with EC2 is so huge that you need really massive traffic spikes for it not to be cheaper to have a bunch of extra dedicated servers on standby.
Nothing stops your from spinning up data crunching EC2 instances at night either, if you want to, and if it really is more cost-effective for you than having VM on your dedicated hardware.
There's plenty of API's available if you want to run your own "private cloud" on those dedicated servers too. I never deploy outside VM's any more, even though I also mainly use dedicated servers.
EC2 is cost effective if you truly have really short term (< 4-6 hours per day) batch processing needs. It continues to shock me how many people take the pain and cost of dealing with EC2 for more typical web app usage.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The main issue with the hybrid approach is devops cost. you will be basically dealing with two very different infrastructures, and building the ops for such a hybrid system could be costly (in money and time). Taking this into account, the money you save shrinks, In addition, a more complex system most likely has more parts to fail as well, so your total reliability might suffer somewhat as well. Another thing to tak…
Rackspace and Softlayer both have dedi/cloud hybrid offerings. You don't need to support multiple companies or multiple private networks to get the benefits. They still offer multiple datacenters for reliability.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#28We use SoftLayer to run a few hundred nodes and they have issues as well. For example, their network sucks and they have high rate of hardware failure (sometimes hard drive failures are off the charts).
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#291. AWS beats all others when it comes to security [1].
2. EC2 is just one item in the package called AWS. Hence, if you just build something more than just "web-app with *db" at the back-end, say a full blown platform, then I know no other option for you to get the full stack integrated API for Data-warehouse, DNS, Load-balancing, auto-scaling, billing, etc.
3. Speed is sometimes over-rated. You should be be speedy where it matters more. That is, how fast can you redeploy your entire cloud from scratch in case of a disaster should be more interesting to you than if a webpage takes 20 more ms to get to the browser. In our case, at AWS, it is a matter of 1: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ and https://aws.amazon.com/security/
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#30This 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.
Hmm I would like to hear more about these problems that prevent people from spinning up instances. Is it a frequently occurring problem or only happens rarely (e.g. when APIs are down). Also are they managing the instances themselves or using EC2's AutoScaling cluster? I run a dynamically scaling cluster on EC2 and have not run into the problems like you mentioned, so I would like to hear more about them if possible. Maybe they are spinning up and down too rapidly and exceeds the API rate limit? You'd have to have a bugged/bad provisioning system to accomplish that though...