Interesting article, thanks for sharing. We actually just went the exact opposite because of the larger scale issues we were having with Softlayer.
Do you feel like you lost any resiliency by making the switch to physical servers (more virtual instances on one physical server, servers in the same rack, etc)?
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
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh, there wasn't a handful of servers after we finished the migration (we have migrated a bit late IMO, so we had a lot of traffic even back then). And today, with much larger infrastructure, with hardware clusters specifically tailored to our customers needs, etc I'm pretty sure the same infrastructure on EC2 would cost more than 2x. (Update) Re: failures - with a ~50 servers we see a hardware issue (disk dead in a…
How do you monitor HW and network failures and how do you notify SoftLayer? Is that 1-2 hours replacement time true for each components of your server fleet?
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#73Cases where people try to use EC2:
- We're starting from scratch and think AWS will give us flexibility for cheap
- We have existing servers and think moving from them to AWS will give us flexibility for cheap
Cases where people move away from EC2:
- It was slow/unreliable
- It was expensive
Conlusion: You should use AWS EC2 in order to save money and have flexible resource allocation, but don't expect it to be stable or cost-effective.
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
because they take care of the DevOps portion of your infrastructure Sorry, but that is mostly a lie. Running a non-trivial app on EC2 is significantly more complex than doing the same on (rented) bare metal. Scaling to a massive size can be easier on EC2, but only after you paid a significant upfront cost in terms of dollars and development complexity. Is your app prepared to deal with spontaneous instance hangs, (dr…
This comment is pure gold! That's exactly what I wanted to explain here and you did it so well. Thanks!
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#75From my experience AWS is one of the most reliable hosting providers. It's extremely easy to setup a fault tolerant infrastructure using cloudformation, puppet/chef etc, boto and a bit of autoscaling. The only disadvantage AWS has is costs. In many cases it's more expensive than a traditional hosting provider. On the flip side, your engineers will be more productive.
What I miss in this article is any details on why they had issues with AWS. You can't just say it wasn't reliable and not explain the details. AWS works for all of the world's largest startups, why didn't it work for Swiftype?
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I see no explanation for why suppliers wouldn't match demand. Aside from the HDD shortage which hit everyone, I've seen no issues like you're describing where essentially the market runs out of servers/CPUs/etc. 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 A…
No, they can't scale demand that quickly. And time matters. Also, there's no situation where demand can't be met (well, extremely rarely it happens, in case of inelastic goods). What happens is you increase prices until the demand lowers to match the supply. You never run out of products. Similarly, oil supplies will last forever, we won't ever run out of fossil fuels. Simply it will not be worth using them because of the price.
Really, microeconomics 101, all of us should have studied this in the first semester of any engineering degree :)
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#77One 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?
Multiple reasons: 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…
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Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#78There's not much need for a fancy article on a fancy website in order to understand a key concept of cloud computing: Cloud computing offers you the great and awesome advantages of being able to instantly scale your application, replicate your data and basically just grow according to your business volume, and all this without significant investments, delivery time, setup time, people time, maintenance or anything bu…
>you're also paying Amazon's profits. Are you? Amazon is not known for posting profits, and is quite possibly operating AWS at a loss. They have promised to show financial results for AWS itself with the quarterly report being released next month, so we'll see.
Profit for something like AWS is likely difficult to put a number on.
They built it so they could run Amazon.com off the infrastructure, but then decided they could make money leasing their under-subscribed portions.
If they are not making a cut-and-dry profit from AWS (I'd fathom they are, they are one of the most expensive cloud providers and many other providers turn a healthy profit), then they are at least dramatically offsetting their own Amazon.com infrastructure costs which are mandatory anyway.
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#79There's not much need for a fancy article on a fancy website in order to understand a key concept of cloud computing: Cloud computing offers you the great and awesome advantages of being able to instantly scale your application, replicate your data and basically just grow according to your business volume, and all this without significant investments, delivery time, setup time, people time, maintenance or anything bu…
> There's not much need for a fancy article on a fancy website in order to understand a key concept of cloud computing: I wish it were true, but plenty of companies are gripped by cloud fever. I've seen quite a few going down the route of charging into the cloud not because they've run the numbers and found it stacks up, but because they want to be in the cloud, and Amazon have some great marketing people.
It is interesting coming at it from the other side, I get hit up all the time to move my infrastructure to the cloud, I give them the specs and what I pay per month, tell them that if they can beat it I'll switch. The closest anyone has come has been about 4x the cost I'm currently paying.
But I note that I have a unique case that isn't covered by the cloud "architecture" (crawling the web and indexing it). Explaining that it is "ok" if I am in the 10% not covered by your 90% solution. But sales folks never like to hear that.
Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see no explanation for why suppliers wouldn't match demand. Aside from the HDD shortage which hit everyone, I've seen no issues like you're describing where essentially the market runs out of servers/CPUs/etc. 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 A…
No, they can't scale demand that quickly. And time matters. Also, there's no situation where demand can't be met (well, extremely rarely it happens, in case of inelastic goods). What happens is you increase prices until the demand lowers to match the supply. You never run out of products. Similarly, oil supplies will last forever, we won't ever run out of fossil fuels. Simply it will not be worth using them because o…
You make it sound as if Amazon buying servers was some kind of unexpected freak event.
They are just one of many large companies who buy hardware constantly.
Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Rackspace, Leaseweb, to name a few others...