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Why I Dislike EC2

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101–110 of 191 posts

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#101

Post by j-kidd »

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…

You are making it sounds like EC2 versus dedicated hosting. There are other cloud hosting providers such as Joyent who offer much better performance and reliability at lower price. In Joyent case, they even have experts of the whole stack (Illumos, ZFS, DTrace, KVM) working internally.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#102

Post by davidbanham »

Route53 is _nice_. ELBs are _nice_. Cloudwatch is _nice_. Security groups are _nice_. You can get similar stuff with most providers, but AWS is a better holistic package for my money.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#103

Post by gingerlime »

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/

I've had a rather spotty experience with DigitalOcean unfortunately. Some times you can't create instances, it just hangs there waiting forever. You can't replicate snapshots between regions. I click the button but nothing happens... I've also had an order of magnitude worse network bandwidth sending backups to S3, both in Amsterdam and NY.

It's ok for a dev box or playing around, and it's definitely cheap, but I wouldn't trust any production servers on it. _Yet_. I do see they improve at a very impressive pace, with new features becoming available regularly, so things hopefully change for the better... It's still nowhere near being a match to AWS, or even Linode.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#104

Post by adventured »

m0th87 wrote: post #67
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"?

Well I think my point was exactly that: if you're building a fairly standard site / service / app, you absolutely do not have any practical reason to use AWS, particularly if you have a modest budget.

The radical majority (99.999%?) of all sites on the web can easily be run by a cheap dedicated server. And I'm not talking Softlayer, which itself is expensive in the world of dedicated hosts; there are several better priced providers that are nearly as good as Softlayer.

EC2 is never going to appeal to the bottom 99% of the web, until their prices come way down (and Amazon may never care about that). Dedicated hosts will keep offering more and more ooomph per dollar. The demands on a typical site in the US market (prime AWS customers currently) are not going up much per year at this point, as web usage is no longer growing much for the first world. Meanwhile hardware and bandwidth for an average dedicated server just keep getting better.

Services that used to cost me $300 to $500 / month to run four or five years ago, I can now operate for 1/3 that price on even more powerful dedicated servers.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#105

Post by hexedpackets »

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…

$720/mo is solely for the instance. Add in the cost of traffic (Softlayer appears to give you 5TB, so let's use that) and you're up to $1463/mo.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#106

Post by x0x0 »

pitchups wrote: post #36
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.

You should probably not use softlayer cloud; a very bright ops guy at scribd had a horrific time doing so.

http://kovyrin.net/2011/05/02/cloudlayer-bad-story/

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#107

Post by pjungwir »

ilaksh wrote: post #94

Do the small ec2 instances have the same performance problems as the micros? I just told my boss the other day I wasnt comfortable usings micros in production. Surely the smalls perform better?

Micros are really a completely different class from smalls and larges, because they offer "burst" performance. You shouldn't run anything in production on a micro, unless it's non-critical and not public-facing. Perhaps a 100% static web site, although even that I'm not sure about.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#108

Post by sluukkonen »

x0x0 wrote: post #106
pitchups wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should probably not use softlayer cloud; a very bright ops guy at scribd had a horrific time doing so. http://kovyrin.net/2011/05/02/cloudlayer-bad-story/

It's also 2 years old, so a lot might've changed.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#109

Post by kppullin »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #79
kppullin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-u…

This is not entirely correct. AWS does offer AWS GovCloud which, provides an environment that enables agencies to comply with HIPAA regulations [1]. You have to be a US government organization to use it though. Updated: AWS also has a whitepaper on Creating HIPAA-Compliant Medical Data Applications with AWS [2]. Looks like this is support on the standard non GovCloud stack. [1] http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-n…

The trouble with HIPAA requirements is that they're not clearly defined and are open to a variety of interpretations.

Our experts advise a safe, CYA approach and mandate a BAA agreement is in place with every partner touching sensitive patient data, even if encrypted and protected on multiple levels. Thus far Amazon is not accommodating to such a request.

Other's have their own opinions and, in the end, we all weigh the risks vs rewards (including Amazon itself - I'm sure they've plenty of reasons of operating in their present gray area).

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#110

Post by Negitivefrags »

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…

I think a lot of cloud developers have lost touch about what a modern dedicated server is capable of.

In February our website was top 3,000 on Alexa. 150 requests a second on average looking over that month. Those are dynamically generated pages, since all the static assets are served by CDN.

What handles all that?

3 servers running a PHP application. Oh, and the Postgres database is sitting on one of those servers and replicates to one of the others.

We can do it with 2, but we have 3 so that if some of them dies we don't have to worry.

These are the cheapest servers that Softlayer offers and they run at a low load average.

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