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Why I Dislike EC2

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Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#31

Post by vidarh »

jd007 wrote: post #22
latch wrote: post #14

Earlier 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…

My experience is that the devops cost drops: Most of the time you're dealing with a much simpler and more predictable dedicated environment - your challenges happen when you have to handle (rare) abnormal spikes.

In terms of inter-datacenter network reliability: You have to deal with this if you want reliable hosting anyway. If you spread your database and app servers across data centers, yes, you are begging for problems and the problem is that your app is not designed for resilience.

But you can easily enough do "hybrid" within the same datacenter, if you opt for any of the number of EC2 alternatives from companies that also do dedicated hosting.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#32

Post by Vitaly »

Any argument involving price seems to completely ignore TCO. We are using Heroku for most of our needs and suggest it to all our clients and we couldn't be happier to pay the premium over "expensive" AWS. We save a lot on IT and maintenance. Unless you are paying thousands of dollars per month, or your time is very cheap doing your own servers will cost you more.

If AWS were so expensive and "not worth it" what are the guys from Netflix smoking? ;)

Also see this AWS cost analysis from TripAdvisor Technical Operations team: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/2/an-epic-tripadviso...

"Combined cost for each datacenter is about $1.3M per year." ... "If we spent the $1.3M per year on a complete EC2 site instead, we could afford the following architecture, provided that we used one-year reserved instances." ... "This means that we could add more than 60% capacity our current configuration"

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#33

Post by staunch »

+ You get very unpredictable server resources, which is why disk and network throughput can vary wildly.

These issues are why we started Uptano, really just to scratch this itch for ourselves. Plug: https://uptano.com

The thing is, EC2 really was neat when it launched, but there are so many things that can be improved upon. Amazon has moved surprisingly slowly in improving EC2 itself.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#34

Post by jd007 »

dangrossman wrote: post #27
jd007 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am aware of that but thanks for pointing it out explicitly for others. I was addressing more about the original article's suggesting of running a hybrid system of dedicated + EC2.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#35

Post by dangrossman »

bcoates wrote: post #25

I'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, s…

EC2 is more expensive than renting dedicated hardware. Housing/power/cooling/networking/etc are all built-in to that price, not added costs. Colocating your own hardware is not the only option. You can provision someone else's dedicated hardware in under an hour, all costs included, with 24/7 on-site staff to handle failed components or other issues (which again are included in the price).

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#36

Post by pitchups »

dangrossman wrote: post #4

On 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…

We use Softlayer too for the same reasons. Have been with them for over 10 years now - since they were called The Planet. Just had one hardware failure during the entire time. They also now offer Cloud computing instances - which can be deployed either hourly or monthly. And you can mix and match your Cloud and dedicated servers - giving you all the flexibility to scale that you get with AWS / EC2.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#37

Post by nwh »

Afforess wrote: post #7

I 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 https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing https://api.digitalocean.com/

As always, the coupon "SSDTWEET" will get you $10 of account credit on signup.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#39

Post by saosebastiao »

As someone who loves EC2 (and happens to work for Amazon, but in a different domain), I can't figure out why people/companies haven't moved towards Hybrid Clouds. There are several strengths and weaknesses of the various providers, and the reward-to-risk ratio of locking yourself into one platform is just too small to matter. There are several scenarios where I could see myself using a combination of Rackspace + EC2 + Linode + colocation. A little puppet/chef knowledge goes a long way.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#40

Post by krallin »

vidarh wrote: post #26
krallin wrote: post #15

Programmatic 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…

Switching load or transferring data between a remote DC (your dedicated servers) and AWS is not that easy when you start having large-scale infrastructure though.

This is a great idea on paper - but running your baseline infrastructure at your dedicated provider and the rest on EC2 is definitely a challenging task.

Not that it's impossible, but that's probably going to be extra work at the app level.

---

Running OpenStack / CloudStack, or similar software on dedicated servers is indeed a relevant solution too, but this is an extra maintenance cost to bear in mind.

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