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Why I Dislike EC2

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Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#131

Post by neya »

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…

How does Rackspace work? Do they work just like Linode or are they an AWS competitor? I heard some good reviews about them, but not sure...Anyone here on Rackspace who could give us some pluses and minuses of the service?

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#132

Post by whyleyc »

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…

Hey Dan, interesting to hear your experiences with EC2, especially with RDS - Would you mind expanding on your comment:

  "EBS would fail often too"
How often is often, and in what way did it fail ?

I'm currently thinking about using RDS in a production environment and it would be interesting to know the limitations.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#133

Post by lucian1900 »

lsh123 wrote: post #121
dorfsmay wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Assumptions are certainly part of it. Software is often designed to consider certain round-trips cheap and others expensive. If this assumption does not apply, it will perform terribly.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#134

Post by lucian1900 »

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…

Inter-datacenter network latency is also a limiting factor. Round trips between an app server and a database add up quickly if they take long.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#135

Post by weitzj »

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…

AWS best practices:

plan for EBS to fail

plan for RDS to fail

'snapshot early snapshot often', as snapshots will help you in case of a failure

there is no automatic snapshot functionality ( yet? )

plan how to snapshot an EBS RAID (Filesystem, uptime)

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#136

Post by adient »

tszming wrote: post #125
hexedpackets wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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)

*isnt much cheaper if you need a server with no storage or network usage.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#137

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

jasonkester wrote: post #130

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…

It's in the name, of course: Elastic Compute Cloud. If you need a static cloud, it's not for you.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#138

Post by mva »

First, people seem to think EC2 saves you time and hassle. Compared to collocated servers, this is true. But compared to dedicated servers, managed or unmanaged, it simply isn't. Hardware fails? They'll replace it (at no cost).

I totally disagree. OK, maybe it takes a bit more time to set everything up, but when you have it all up and running (AMI's, Autoscaling, etc.) you have a robust setup that can scale when you scale (up or down). Adding a new instance literally only takes some minutes. Try that with a dedicated setup. It's more expensive for sure, but comes with a lot of flexibility.

What I see as an EC2 (or AWS in general) issue / challenge is that it's hard to switch providers. When you use S3, SQS, Cloudwatch, Elasticache, Cloudfront, DynamoDB, SES, Route53 your code is totally integrated / adapted to AWS. You can't take your code and deploy it on a different setup elsewhere.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#139

Post by Spooky23 »

boas wrote: post #81
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…

According to Amazon, their employees are not allowed to access to your data, so you don't need to sign a business associate agreement with them to be HIPAA compliant. I imagine this is similar to how sending patient information through the post office is not considered a disclosure to the post office.

Unfortunately, contracts with most medical companies or governments handling HIPPA data disagree.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#140

Post by clarkevans »

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…

As of March 2013 (two years past those publish dates), Amazon has still not agreed to the legal "Business Associate Agreement" provisions of HIPPA that would permit you to use their services to store Protected Health Information. They said they are considering it, but this has been the status for quite some time. Rackspace, on the other hand, has agreed (for a surcharge).
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