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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

#61

Post by davidw »

wonnage wrote: post #59
davidw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have something better to point to? It's easy to complain about stuff, but at least he's out there trying to do something. Presumably it can be improved. I'm particularly fond of the quote "lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way", which is a bit harsh in this case because a lot of your advice is good. It could be framed in a more constructive way, though - there's some Comic Book Guy tone there in your co…

Well, if these benchmarks are misguided and useless, it is useful to recognize it as such so you don't go out and trade all your EC2 instances for Linodes. "At least we're doing something!" is a silly defense.

They probably have some faults, but the general conclusions smell right to me: I don't think they're in the "really screwed up and wildly misleading" category, but in the "ok, interesting, could use some work though" category.

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

#63

Post by imperialWicket »

These are fine benchmarks for consideration, IFF you are interested in using AWS EC2 instances as a vps. This might not be a terrible endeavor, but it's really not the intended use.

EBS performance is an issue - Yes it is, don't use EBS. Use instance store and push to S3 for persistence. If you need performance I/O for something, there is likely a separate service available that pushes your I/O bottleneck further away (RDS, ElastiCache, SQS, etc.).

AWS costs more for weaker CPU - Indeed, this can be the case. But, it's often cheaper (but not much) to put up an Elastic Load Balancer with an Auto Scaling Group and dynamically support your peak traffic than it is to pay for an enormous VPS that sits idle 60% of the time.

As these benchmarks suggest, I agree that if you're only using one EC2 instance (and you can't get away with a micro), you should probably be investigating other solutions. If you want to architect your app/project/service/whatever to be more distributed and fault-tolerant, AWS can probably make that easier (not necessarily cheaper).

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

#67

Post by fleitz »

oogali wrote: post #47

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 apartme…

Yeah, it's really surprising that a server with 8 cores is rocking a server with 1 / 2 running apache. This could all be explained by latency.

I'd much rather see a two or three synthetic benchmarks around harddrive throughput/latency, memory throughput/latency and CPU.

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

#69

Post by lifeguard »

oogali wrote: post #47

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 apartme…

To be fair to Amazon the author should have spun up 100 instances, benchmarked them, and used the fastest one. This is a best practice for AWS.

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

#70

Post by tyw »

ww520 wrote: post #62

One of downsides of AWS is the bandwidth cost. It's 5x to 10x more expensive. Running heavy media based websites is just not feasible.

you wouldn't want to do this straight out of EC2, but once you add S3=>CloudFront to the mix it's much less bad. Only thing you want to be serving from your EC2 boxes and load balancer is gzipped HTML/CSS/JS (could even do CSS/JS on S3/CF if you wanted).
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