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Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

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Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#41

Post by rschmitty »

corresation wrote: post #31
bryanlarsen wrote: post #14

Did you try multiple instances on each provider? Performance between VPS's from the same provider varies wildly. If there are 64 VPS's on a server, you will probably get a lot more than 1/64th of the processing power of that server because most of the other VPS's are idle. But how much more than 1/64th you get will vary wildly from machine to machine.

Performance between VPS's from the same provider varies wildly. This absolutely should not be true, and in my experience it isn't true on Amazon -- you will neither be starved for resources if others do intensive things, nor will you enjoy riches if they are quiet: You will get what you are paying for. I have a personal experience from Digital Ocean that is a bit different. Firstly let me say that I think they have a…

This absolutely _is_ true, and in my experience it has been on AWS. Search for past benchmarks on HN for examples.

Regardless, we stick to AWS at work for the entire suite.

When it comes to my money though, DO is making very large strides imo

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#42

Post by jasonmccay »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #39

This is only true with the small instance type though, which is severely CPU handicapped. The larger instances (> medium) get the full CPU throughput. Their "EC2 Compute Unit" rating is mostly marketing, I could never verify it by practice. Some instances with twice the ECU actually give more than twofold performance, while instances with 1 ECU should be renamed to 0,25 ECU. I would expect anyone who works with AWS t…

I am curious about this. No doubt the Amazon small is quite the laggard, but as price and capability scale on each platform, I would be curious to know what the results look like.

Secondly, if you wanted to get truly accurate results, doing this same test over an array of provisioned instances would be good, as quality can vary.

Still, interesting information nonetheless. Really surprised how much faster Linode was than DigitalOcean.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#43

Post by sologoub »

mgkimsal wrote: post #5

Yes, amazon is 'overpriced' if what you're looking at is CPU or disk speed (which is not a bad metric, really). Where amazon shines is the amount of programmatic interaction you can do with it - have build scripts kick off an EC2 instance to run tests, send reports, shut it down. Programmatically bring up more instances during peak times, spin them down at night, etc. AFAICT, Linode doesn't offer that, and they proba…

My thoughts exactly. Also, the AWS ecosystem provides quite the tool chain that is all technically intra data center. Just the S3 interaction is worth a lot if you have to deal with UGC or large amounts of system-generated files (like call recordings).

Another important aspect is ability to easily transfer raw data into an analysis tool, like Red Shift. Google also excels here with their Compute Engine and Big Query.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#44

Post by oblio »

PaulHoule wrote: post #27

The 'small' instance he's testing is the worst deal Amazon offers. If you buy certain instances you get can a better connection to EBS, and then you can allegedly buy better I/O for $. A fair analysis is going to involve pages and pages of graphs and charts... It is hard to beat AMZN's flexibility and easy provisioning. For instance, even my sister-in-law can walk up to AWS, spin up an instance with Windows, log in w…

> If you buy certain instances you get can a better connection to EBS, and then you can allegedly buy better I/O for $

You actually buy provisioned IO. The throughput can be actually smaller in some scenarios than for non-provisioned IO, provided you: don't have neighbors or they are not noisy. And boy, is that provisioned IO expensive (we've bought quite a bit of EBS volumes).

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#45

Post by anizan »

patja wrote: post #18
okrasz wrote: post #3

There are at least two tools which are very useful in such comparisons - http://www.cloudorado.com for pricing, and http://cloudharmony.com/ for benchmarks.

Those are interesting sites but I didn't see Digital Ocean in their benchmarks or lists of offerings. Seems like a big omission.

Check out http://www.serverbear.com

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#47

Post by oogali »

sigh

I call these "weekend benchmarks" -- what you'd typically do when you have a block of free time, then spend time optimizing for said benchmark. Roll in on Monday with some staggering results, only to find one (or many) of your variables were off.

Did the author try multiple instances on each provider? VM tenancy is a bitch. (Think of how annoyed you get at the noise levels, when your neighbor in the next apartment throws a party)

Is the author's source benchmarking machine, a physical machine, or a virtualized guest? Does it have power savings turned off so that the process is running at 100% speed, instead of a variably-clocked down core?

Did the author enable or disable TCP time-wait recycle? So he doesn't bump into said ceiling when running such tests back to back?

Did the author run the tests back to back, or have a cool down period between tests?

Where was the author's network upstream located when he tried said tests? Were there any network issues at the time of the test? Would the author even be aware of them?

Your page you're testing against, does the same database call, which is presumably cached. Did he throw out the cached results? Can he identify the cached results?

Are we firing up ApacheBench with HTTP keepalives enabled? With parallel connections? How many parallel connections?

How many Apache servers (StartServers, MinSpareServers, etc)? Which httpd modules were enabled? Which httpd modules were disabled? Which PHP modules were enabled?

You're trying to benchmark CPU and I/O horsepower across three different platforms but doing it through this narrow "straw" which consists of your "independent server", your upstream, your upstream's upstream, your upstream's upstream's peering connection with Amazon/Linode/DigitalOcean, your web server and its PHP module, your application, and MySQL.

If you're rolling your eyes at this, then you shouldn't be doing weekend benchmarks.

I'll leave you with this as well:

http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#48

Post by eli »

niel wrote: post #11
mgkimsal wrote: post #5

Yes, amazon is 'overpriced' if what you're looking at is CPU or disk speed (which is not a bad metric, really). Where amazon shines is the amount of programmatic interaction you can do with it - have build scripts kick off an EC2 instance to run tests, send reports, shut it down. Programmatically bring up more instances during peak times, spin them down at night, etc. AFAICT, Linode doesn't offer that, and they proba…

> AFAICT, Linode doesn't offer that, and they probably won't. While perhaps not entirely as mature and full featured as AWS's offering, Linode does offer an api with which you can script creation/initialization of test servers. See https://www.linode.com/api/linode They also offer something called StackScript, that to me looks like some kind of configuration management script. https://www.linode.com/stackscripts/

I use Linode. I like Linode.

But they do not make it very easy to spin up / down new instances. Setting aside the API, they bill you for a full month for a new instance as soon as you create it. True, you get a pro-rated credit if you delete it earlier but this is awkward and I think it only pro-rates by the day.

And StackScripts kinda sorta work, but they are hard to write/debug and are not portable. It's a pretty weak offering.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#50

Post by kbar13 »

iriche wrote: post #29
qeorge wrote: post #21

I've been able to make good utilization of Linode's multiple cores for our Sphinx server ( http://sphinxsearch.com/ ) In sphinx's config files, its super easy to split an index up into 4 parts, and then assign each partial index to one core. Doing this, we find that all 4 cores are utilized nicely (>50%) almost all of the time. I feel like we're getting a really good value out of that machine. AirBnB has a good write…

Now you can increase that to 6 parts since Linode increased to 6 cores :)

8* cores

https://blog.linode.com/2013/03/18/linode-nextgen-the-hardwa...

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