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Why I Dislike EC2

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Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#171

Post by dk8996 »

pjungwir wrote: post #107
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.

You can actually run static web site from S3. Its really easy to setup, you can point your domain at a public S3 bucket. I put together this small website (http://www.de-encode.com/) to play around with it, seems to work well.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#172

Post by incision »

nirvdrum wrote: post #149
CodeFoo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What Amazon offering is? This is AWS we're talking about. They have a service solution for nearly everything. You're saying in 2013 they still don't have a service for 24/7/365 website hosting?

I know you were asking for effect, but of course they do and it's EC2. That's why they have a heavy reservation pricing tier, which only makes sense for 24/7/365 (you pay for hours even if you don't use them). But, it's fun to point at "elastic" and tell people they're "doing it wrong" because they don't take a name chosen 7 years ago literally. As if somehow the service (called EC2 virtually everywhere -- not Elasti…

>But, it's fun to point at "elastic" and tell people they're "doing it wrong" because they don't take a name chosen 7 years ago literally.

It's not an arbitrary name, elasticity is a defining concept of "cloud".

>As if somehow the service (called EC2 virtually everywhere -- not Elastic Cloud Compute) could never evolve beyond that initial use case.

EC2 is one tool. There are other tools in the Amazon box for other use cases [0] and other boxes from other providers entirely.

>Incidentally, the "elastic" in EBS must have a different meaning because one of its primary selling points is that it's persistent storage.

It's elastic because you can allocate and deallocate rapidly and pay only for what's allocated at a given time.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5819017

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#173

Post by crazygringo »

whyleyc wrote: post #132
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.

It's in the AWS docs -- basically, EBS (and RDS built on top of it) is more reliable than a standard hard drive, but nothing like S3 -- you need to expect RDS to fail eventually, just like you would with a server of your own.

But, that's why AWS gives you RDS backups, AZ failover, etc. -- the backups won't fail (they're stored on S3), and with AZ failover, you can make downtime vanishingly small. But you need to actually do that.

A lot of people seem to confuse S3's 99.9999...% reliability with the EBS-backed stuff, which you must plan for eventual failure with.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#174

Post by boas »

Spooky23 wrote: post #139
boas wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you sign business associate agreements with your colo facility, ISP, and landlord? They also are physically capable of accessing your data, even though they are legally or contractually forbidden from doing so.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#175

Post by neya »

vacri wrote: post #152
neya wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We had a 2/3 ec2 1/3 rackspace split, and ended up moving largely off rackspace for operational reasons. I found the interface much more usable at AWS, whereas the one at Rackspace was a 'five clicks to do anything' webif, though apparently they've improved in recent months. I'm not heavily experienced in cloud offerings, but it's far easier to manage the AWS stuff than the rackspace - the DNS management is quite fle…

Thank you for your feedback :)

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#176

Post by neya »

theg2 wrote: post #163
neya wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We were on Rackspace before moving to AWS. Their sales person flat out told us on our contract renewal call that the only thing they could compete with AWS with was customer service. I appreciated their honestly but they were lacking a few required services for us at the time.

Thank you for your feedback :)

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#177

Post by Goladus »

vacri wrote: post #154
Goladus wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. And of course, the second letter stands for compute . If you find yourself using words like traffic instead of computation and discussing the finer points of the per-hour billing feature instead of how many CPU-hours of jobs are enqueued, you should definitely consider that you're trying to use a tool that wasn't designed with your needs in mind. That said, AWS in general has a lot of useful tools for web dev…

I'm interested to hear the next shoehorned criticism based on the third word, 'cloud'.

You won't, because there does not appear to be a related chronic misunderstanding with that one.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#178

Post by twistedpair »

kppullin wrote: post #109
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I worked for a major hospital once and they were all about the CYA agreements. The funny thing was the HIPPA is more a state of mind, not a 100 point punch list. So you're really just practicing CYA more than anything else.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#179

Post by twistedpair »

Spooky23 wrote: post #139
boas wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually the HMO I worked for did. Every vendor such as ISP's, Colo's, and some API suppliers had to sign the CYA agreement. Most of them are aghast when you ask them to sign. Basically they have to take on all of the liabilities. I've never seen it have to be exercised however.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#180

Post by twistedpair »

nirvdrum wrote: post #89
forrestthewoods wrote: post #16

The first letter in EC2 stands for elastic. If you aren't using EC2 for it's elasticity then you're probably doing it wrong. Kind of a no-brainer.

Considering Amazon offers an entire pricing tier around 24/7 utilization (heavy reserved instances), it's probably safe to say that EC2 is no longer purely elastic.

It's called base load, a rather important concept in scaling to demand, much the same as the power industry.
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