You also lose one of EC2's only advantage: per hour billing.
This isn't true. Reserved instances still use per hour billing, just at a discounted rate.
Why I Dislike EC2
51–60 of 191 posts
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#52I'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…
Just last week I ran the numbers on my current DC costs - hardware, cooling, space, network - versus EC2 and it was 60% more expensive per month for EC2.
Quite a premium. Even adding in the salaries for my admin team only drop it a few more percentage points.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#53We 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).
We're in the same boat.
I definitely agree with you on the disk failures, and that's something I need to bring up with our account manager.
The above said, the network has been solid for us at SoftLayer for the last 1 1/2 - 2 years (things were rocky for a little while before that as the client base outgrew their capacity). Of course, your systems might be in different data centers to us so mileage may differ.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#54As 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…
I can't quite parse what you're saying about the reward to risk level being too low for lock in, but having worked with a number of startups that were 100% aws and paying dearly for it thge lock in was their major problem - ec2 ancillary private branded or unique services all seem to be designed with lock in being the number one goal. From what I've seen the first acknowledgment of lock in seems to open the flood gat…
I know of a few people that say that there are benefits to sticking to one platform...that there is less maintenance and lower friction from the "one stop shop" setups that you get on App Engine or Heroku or AWS. I'm just saying those benefits are tiny in comparison to the risks of lock in.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#55>> At our most expensive location, we get 64GB ECC RAM, 4x1TB RAID 10 (hardware), Dual E5-2620 and 4 1Gbps adapters (bonded, 2x public, 2x private) for around 60% the price of an M3-2XLarge. M3-2XLarge = $720 per month, 60% = $432 As a softlayer customer, I would be very surprised if you can get 2620/64GB/4TB disks at this price range, we also consider ourself not a small customer, but for the above config, I guess w…
Are you including the up-front payment required for reserved instances?
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#561. 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 w…
> 1. AWS beats all others when it comes to security [1].
While the compliance and security links are impressive, AWS still doesn't offer a BAA agreement for HIPAA/HITECH compliance.
There are plenty of health care companies that are held back from AWS for this single reason.
Surprisingly enough Microsoft is leading in this respect (or not, given their historical enterprise focus...) - http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/security-and-compl...
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#571. 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 w…
1. Agreed. IAM is really, really, nice, and I find myself missing it greatly when I'm on other platforms.
2. We use quite a few more things than EC2 for our systems. - SQS eliminates the need to build / manage a queuing system. - DynamoDB/SimpleDB eliminate the need to build / manage a distributed data store. - OpsWorks eliminates the need for a DevOps team (mostly). - ELB eliminates the need to build / manage a load balancer. - SES seamlessly takes care of out-bound mail. - Direct Connect gives us a way to extend our DC tools into the "cloud". - And to top it all off, I can bring up any/all of these services at a moments notice, run some experiments, and then shut them down when I'm done.
I don't think there are very many vendors that can help us do these things with this much flexibility. Yea, AWS can be expensive, but we feel like its worth it.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#58Any 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 t…
I use AWS extensively, but to be completely fair, Netflix doesn't really care about operations costs. Yes, seriously. Their media licensing is so much more expensive, they do not optimize bang-for-buck, going as far as using larger instances (to avoid noisy neighbor problems) that are much less cost effective.
So while AWS might be completely worth it for some people (it is for us), Netflix isn't the best argument :).
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#59I'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).
I'm speccing out some things I host on AWS on softlayer's dedicated hosting, and I'm not coming up with vastly cheaper prices there either. I can get big (compared to ec2) servers cheap but storage costs eat up most of the advantage.
Re: Why I Dislike EC2
#60Is there something comparable to Hetzner in the US?