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Why I Dislike EC2

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Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#61

Post by tzury »

nasalgoat wrote: post #45
tzury wrote: post #29

1. 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…

20ms could mean the difference between a single digit rank in the App Store and a three digit rank. I see it every day - if my systems drop by 50ms average, I see a drop in rank. And 20ms? Try more like 300ms+ difference. Hell, sometimes a full second or more for some sites. Anyone who says total disaster recovery time is more important than total latency isn't running anything remotely to scale.

Are you globally distributed? Are you using CloudFront?

Those are cheap services which improve speed dramatically.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#62

Post by banachtarski »

tzury wrote: post #29

1. 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…

It's not just a question of speed. If your machines are slow, that means you need more machines to handle your throughput, which means you are paying for that 20 ms slowdown in actual dollars.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#63

Post by tszming »

nasalgoat wrote: post #55
tszming wrote: post #47

>> 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?

$720 is the on demand monthly price for m3.2xlarge.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#64

Post by nasalgoat »

tzury wrote: post #61
nasalgoat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20ms could mean the difference between a single digit rank in the App Store and a three digit rank. I see it every day - if my systems drop by 50ms average, I see a drop in rank. And 20ms? Try more like 300ms+ difference. Hell, sometimes a full second or more for some sites. Anyone who says total disaster recovery time is more important than total latency isn't running anything remotely to scale.

Are you globally distributed? Are you using CloudFront? Those are cheap services which improve speed dramatically.

Yes and yes, we're using a CDN. Neither of those change that EC2 instances are slow and have unreliable performance, and the network is abstracted to the point where you can't effectively control packet flow.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#65

Post by gfodor »

thejosh wrote: post #13
duaneb wrote: post #5

You 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.

So what you're saying is the mattress is better or that the mattress is a false analogy?

I'm happy to pay a premium to not have to worry about the countless things that AWS deals with. Whenever people complain about AWS having downtime I have to wonder how sure they are that their uptime track record would be better.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#66

Post by latch »

tszming wrote: post #47

>> 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…

we use 100tb.com, a sofltayer reseller. It's $359 + $50 since both DC and SG aren't official 100tb datacenters:

http://www.100tb.com/server-deals/

We get access to Softlayer's vpn, their control panel..pretty much everything.

Years ago, at a different company, we used Softlayer proper...you can negotiate prices down by huge amounts..even so, they are overpriced when you take into account their reseller. (Note, I know the deal says 48GB, but we have 10 or so of those servers, and they all came with 64...ssshhhh).

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#67

Post by m0th87 »

adventured wrote: post #48

While clearly Amazon is working on bringing down the cost of EC2, as it is today you're paying a premium to get at the AWS ecosystem (and for some companies it's well worth it). There's no other great reason to choose EC2 for servers given the pricing. I understand why people keep writing about the cost, but if you have use for the myriad of AWS services, then good luck replicating what they offer on dedicated server…

If you're making a fairly standard webapp, what does it provide you that, e.g. softlayer or linode does not?

How much of AWS' popularity come from it just being a safe choice, like a cloud version of "No One Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM"?

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#68

Post by jd007 »

krallin wrote: post #44
jd007 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

In the past, when an AZ goes down, everyone tries to transfer to another AZ and makes lots of API calls. Consequently AWS has to rate-limit API requests to avoid taking another AZ down. Maybe this has changed though, but we'll probably have to wait for another disaster to know! --- But of course, an AZ shouldn't be your infrastructure's single point of failure!

I'm aware of the API rate limit when an AZ goes down, but the original comment was about problems that people run into for highly-variable traffic sites that scale up and down on a regular basis (e.g. spin up 20 instances during the day with high traffic, at night shutdown 15 of them to save cost, on a daily basis). This of course is not related to any AZ/API downtime, and I am not aware of any problems that could interfere with the normal usage of APIs during normal service operations, which is why I wanted to hear more about the details of those problems.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#69

Post by latch »

pbreit wrote: post #60

Is there something comparable to Hetzner in the US?

OVH has a datacenter in Quebec. We use OVH in France (OP, btw). It started off because 1 system needed SSDs, and Hetzner isn't great about SSD. Once we had 1 system there, it was easier to put them all there.

Doing it again, I'd pick Hetzner over OVH. The OVH machines are great (weird disk partition though) and they've worked reliably..but the management console is horrible and while the support is fast and helpful, it tends to take a couple back and forth to get to a meaningful conclusion.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#70

Post by ejdyksen »

ejdyksen wrote: post #51

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.

Also, I think the author is mixing up spot instances and on demand instances, which have vastly different pricing structures.
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