51–60 of 194 posts
I used to be able to set a watch by HP's cycle before the EDS buyout.
One 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?
1) you can't get new hardware delivered and get it up and running, all in under 10 minutes.
2) also, assuming the previously gathered hardware is not needed anymore, you can't just return it and say "i used it only for two days because i had a traffic spike, take this 200$ and we're okay.
3) you can't programmatically install, configure, reinstall and reconfigure hardware configurations, networking and services on phisycal services. At least, not as easily.
Many others, but these are very valid points.
Of course, Amazon is not the solution to all of the problems you could ever have, but still it solves a great deal of problems.
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But doesn't Netflix successfully use AWS now? Its possible they get special treatment if they are big enough (nobody else's jobs on their physical machines ... or something like that).
Netflix uses thousands of instances, they don't share servers.
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> 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. You haven't been using Amazon long enough then. Amazon is great for proof of concept. No upfront costs, extremely scalable, etc. Unfortunately, its expensive compared to…
But doesn't Netflix successfully use AWS now? Its possible they get special treatment if they are big enough (nobody else's jobs on their physical machines ... or something like that).
And no, I don't think they're getting any real special treatment from Amazon since every single talk from a Netflix engineer points out the the cloud-specific issues they're solving in their infrastructure software.
One 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?
AWS is always going to include a premium because they take care of the DevOps portion of your infrastructure. There are plenty of virtual hosting companies that cost significantly less than dedicated hardware, if you won't need all the bells and whistles.
No, they don't. They provide the tools, its still up to you to orchestrate it.
It strikes me that more and more a critical selection when growing in this way is the DNS part. It needs to be back-end agnostic and provide an increasing amount of functionality. Health checks and failover are must have now, but this article makes me wonder three things: 1) Are there any DNS services that understand geography of your "zones", i.e. route to and failover based on IP? (but are still platform agnostic).…
2) Yes, some ISPs do set a minimum TTL. Although BGP anycast is the most effective as the first line, sometimes it makes sense to have your reverse proxy caching layer override that distribution based on GeoIP and redirect to a more suitable proxy node closer to the client. This is especially the case when people using recursive lookup DNS servers that aren't necessarily geographically close to them (e.g. 8.8.8.8). It could also be useful in cases where TTL expiration hasn't caught up yet though.
3) No. Think of BGP Anycast DNS as distribution at a global level, and dedicated load balancers as distribution at the local level. You need to work out how to get the traffic to the load balancer first, and load balancing across distant geographies (high latency) results in horrible performance.
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Why would 10,000 servers cost more than 100 servers? It seems like if you are buying all of your parts in bulk they are going to be cheaper. I'm pretty sure Intel's pricing on CPUs are cheaper by the tray than individually. I know at least when I've bought 20-30 servers at a time, I was able to get a lower cost than when I've only been buying one.
Prices go down until to a certain amount, then then start to increase. Analogy: you want to buy shares of company X. If you buy 1, brokerage costs are high compared to your investment. If you buy 100, you still get the shares from the top of the order book, and fees become negligible. Buy 10M, and you will pay much-much more per share because supply is not going to be there. Just think of the simple supply-demand cur…
Because that's the only way this theory applies, if they're completely unable to meet the demand due to some specific shortage in the market.
The only reason your shares analogy makes sense is because there ARE a finite number of shares available at any given time, and buying too many drives up the cost in the entire market. Most manufacturers can scale up production as demand increases.
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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.
Oh, I know what you're talking about. We too had some instances (actually, a lot of those) that would run for a year with no issues. The problems started around the time you tried to push EC2 instances beyond an "idle, handling some requests just to keep from falling asleep" state. Pushing IO (even with provisioned IOPS) caused random IO stalls, pushing CPU caused REALLY uneven performance, etc. And the only solution…
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> The explanation is rather simple - hardware is always "on the premise", yours or Amazon's. Someone needs to swap drives, motherboards, man the networking gear, run cables, etc. > So you're paying Amazon to do the same work you would do otherwise - only you're subject to their rules and procedures and Amazon being a profitable business needs to mark their services up. But I thought that they were paying Softlayer to…
I would like to know the cost calculation after a year or two. With a handful of servers it's easy to get the false impression that HW failures are rare.
(Update) Re: failures - with a ~50 servers we see a hardware issue (disk dead in a RAID or an ECC memory failure) about once a month or so. None of those failures caused a single outage (RAID and ECC RAM FTW) so far.