How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
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How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
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Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#2Author here. Happy to answer any questions.
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#3Author here. Happy to answer any questions.
What size instances were you using in EC2 that were having performance degradation, and what kind of specs did the real hardware have that you moved to?
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#4What specific piece saw the biggest boost? My guess is MongoDB. Also if new servers take 1-2 hours, you are always paying for what you "think" will be capacity for peak load correct? How do you handle events that quickly and drastically increase load or txn/sec?
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#5"With Amazon we experienced networking issues, hanging VM instances, unpredictable performance degradation (probably due to noisy neighbors sharing our hardware, but there was no way to know) and numerous other problems. "
Why do I get the feeling it was kind of a cop-out to just pack up and move without finding the root cause? I've seen it plenty of times: the "best solution" is to just find a different hosting provider.
In my experience, I've never found an issue with an application on AWS that wasn't caused by either a misunderstanding of what was being offered (e.g. not provisioning enough PIOPS for database volumes), or simply issues with the application code.
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#6Author here. Happy to answer any questions.
Using EC2 here for nearly 2 years and you mention I/O problems and instance outages 2-3 times a week. Which size instances were you running?
I ask because other than the VM security updates, none our instances have these sort of issues and some of them have a VERY long life (not ideal we know). I understand the cost savings and the rest of the reasoning but in my experience EC2 isn't THAT unreliable.
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#7Author here. Happy to answer any questions.
Other than ec2, what AWS services were you using and how did you migrate those? At minimum, I'd guess you were using elb for load balancing, sqs for queues and elastic cache for redis.
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#8Author here. Happy to answer any questions.
If you can provide more details on the kind of EC2 instances you were using and the kind of issues that you consider issues that would be great.
In my limited experience, I've rarely faced any significant issues with EC2. I assume your threshold for issues must have been very lower than mine.
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#9What specific piece saw the biggest boost? My guess is MongoDB. Also if new servers take 1-2 hours, you are always paying for what you "think" will be capacity for peak load correct? How do you handle events that quickly and drastically increase load or txn/sec?
Actually, it depends. Stability and performance wise, I'd say our Lucene-based search layer has seen the most impressive jump. But yeah, Mongo instances loved the new fast IO as well :-)
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#10One question. If real hardware was always 50% cheaper then AWS wouldn't have been such a success. Can you please explain in which scenarios it makes economical sense to use AWS compared to real hardware?