Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I Dislike EC2

openmymind.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 191 posts

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#121

Post by lsh123 »

dorfsmay wrote: post #119
lsh123 wrote: post #113

I've run the numbers for our PCI-compliant setup about 1.5 years ago and Amazon was about 3-4x more expensive than the average bid for my RFP for several smaller hosting providers for a mix of dedicated and virtual servers. Another thing I've discovered with AWS (again, it was 1.5 years ago) is a horrible network latencies even inside the same data center on the same VPC: on a "normal" gigabit switch in a dedicated s…

Network latency is very inconsistent on EC2. This is a huge issue is you use a piece of software that assume that you are in a data centre with good networking, as you'd expect in an regular data centre.

It's not about "assuming" things. It's about severe performance degradation beyond any expected levels. Yes, there are solutions to workaround these things. But it will cost way more than a dedicated hardware setup if you account all the costs (software licenses, OPS salaries, etc).

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#122

Post by porker »

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/

I could write the same about Rackspace Cloud - in 2009/early 2010. I suspect (but cannot confirm) this isn't relevant any longer either.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#123

Post by ilaksh »

latch wrote: post #99
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?

Yes they perform better. Benchmark it. But, if you plan on using a few instances that'll be on all the time, and none of the more advanced features....you'll get much better performance, for less, by using someone else. For small setups, Linode and DigitalOcean tend to be much loved (and Hetzner if latency to Europe isn't an issue).

Yeah I have some Linode, Rackspace and DigitalOcean servers, and yes they all seem to be a lot faster than the tiny EC2 instances. Never tried a small EC2 though.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#124

Post by bad_user »

dangrossman wrote: post #18
jd007 wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

That's not necessarily true.

We use ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) with an auto-scaling group behind it. The instances get added or removed based on the latency reported by CloudWatch/ELB. During the course of a day, the number of EC2 instances running can vary from 8 to 25.

Usually 8 is enough, but when spikes happen or when the capacity of instances to process stuff drops (which does happen in cloud-computing, based on what neighbours you have and what they are doing), then new instances are started in a matter of minutes.

And this billing by hour does save us a lot of money. Because 8 instances is enough, until it isn't and the traffic is so huge that it can choke and freeze 8 instances.

Incidental, this ability is one reason we moved off Heroku.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#125

Post by tszming »

hexedpackets wrote: post #105
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.

Yes you are right, and you also need to include the storage cost.

I pick the min. cost for EC2 as my point is to show you that SL isn't much cheaper by a lot (at least using the official channel)

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#126

Post by Nux »

It's almost funny to notice so many people got so brainwashed with "the cloud" hype - especially AWS hype - they completely ignore the alternative and end up paying more for less. "But hey, we're elastic. Gigity!" :-)

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#127

Post by vidarh »

jd007 wrote: post #46
vidarh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

If you are using a hybrid approach (assuming dedicated + EC2), you have to have the ops system in place to deal with the dedicated environment AND the EC2 environment, which is why devops cost will be higher. Of course if you only deal with dedicated hardware your devops cost could drop. Inter-datacenter network issues are less of a problem when your datacenters are from the same provider, because they are responsibl…

> you have to have the ops system in place to deal with the dedicated environment AND the EC2 environment, which is why devops cost will be higher.

Only if you choose your systems so that they can't be used across both platforms. I don't see why anyone would do that if they want to run a hybrid setup.

> Inter-datacenter network issues are less of a problem when your datacenters are from the same provider

If your data centers are from the same provider, your added degree of resilience is much lower.

> because they are responsible for making sure the connection is good.

That doesn't help you when one of the data centers goes out entirely. Such as when the power needs to be cut for fire brigade safety due to a fire alarm (yes, I've experienced that), or the supposedly redundant UPS's triggers failsafes and causes the entire site to go down (experienced that too), or when one of the sites see cascading failures take out heir entire network (seen that happen too).

Assuming you will have live, working network connections between your locations, and/or that all your locations will stay online is pretty much guaranteed to cut your availability.

Basically, if your systems can't operate independently, adding an extra data center means adding more failure points.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#128

Post by regularfry »

threeseed wrote: post #78
banachtarski wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not necessarily. AWS has a far superior network to almost anything else out there. Machine performance is not the only important part.

Cite? Not doubting, honestly interested.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#129

Post by justincormack »

nirvdrum wrote: post #90
threeseed wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. AWS has a far superior network to almost anything else out there. Machine performance is not the only important part.

Sure, but the whole thing is predicated on the 20ms slowdown coming from a slow machine, not network latency. And that's a pretty good assumption. Due to RAM limitations and abysmal performance, I could maybe push 15 concurrent requests on a c1.medium running a Rails app in Passenger with a non-CoW Ruby. Forking is terribly slow on EC2. An m1.small was out of the question.

But if you are using Rails you care more about convenience than performance anyway.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#130

Post by jasonkester »

I sometimes feel like I'm the only one using EC2 as it was intended.

S3stat's nightly job takes about 60 hours to run, and it needs to start and finish between 3am and 6am every morning. Amazon kindly keeps 20 machines ready to do that for me and only charges the time I'm actually using them. That's pretty amazing, and well worth the price in my mind.

So yeah, if you need a box to run your webserver 24/7/365, you can find a better deal elsewhere. But that's really never been what EC2 is for. To continue the example, S3stat.com lives in a cage at a colo since, as the author points out, that's a much better deal than running it on EC2.

Post reply on HN