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Why is reddit relying on only one cloud provider? AWS can/should do better but service providers of the size of reddit should be using mult-vendor set-ups for sure.
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...
Why is reddit relying on only one cloud provider? AWS can/should do better but service providers of the size of reddit should be using mult-vendor set-ups for sure.
It probably has something to do with the group being very small. Sure they turn a lot of traffic, but there's only so much you can do with a group of their size on what I imagine is still a limited budget.
This comment further down, supposedly from an Amazon employee, paints a grim picture for EBS: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It probably has something to do with the group being very small. Sure they turn a lot of traffic, but there's only so much you can do with a group of their size on what I imagine is still a limited budget.
Sounds like a case of similar to safety systems at a nuclear plant. Not pressing until it is REALLY PRESSING! Its the usual dilemma, investing time/moey on something that most likely wont be needed versus adding that cool feature all the users will immediately see the benefit of. In a competitive environment, it isn't difficult to understand how they ended up on one vendor.
If reddit has problems, I suppose the worst that can happen is a cloud of toxic and poorly thought out comments is released on the internet.
So the tradeoffs they've made, in saving some money, are probably sensible.
The AWS business model is to sell shared hosting on commodity hardware. Cloud is a cool buzzword but it is still sharing hardware. Cheap, commodity hardware is the magic that lets you scale up so big and so fast for a highly accessible price. But you're still sharing the same hardware as everyone else and its still just commodity hardware.
Never fails: a cloud provider has issues with a specific cloud product, so clearly the cloud is an illusion that will crash down on you[1]. Any discussion about any cloud provider's product is obviously a chance to soapbox about the industry as a whole. [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...
I'm not immediately planning to move out of AWS, but the trouble with EBS has certainly got me thinking about other options and has made me much less inclined to make an increased commitment to AWS.
Amazon provides plenty of opportunities to mitigate for this, such as providing multiple availability zones. Reddit, if you read the original blog post, wasn't designed for that - it was designed for a single data centre.
OTOH, the variability of EBS performance is true, and frustrating. If you do a RAID0 stripe across 4 drives, you can expect around sustained 100 MB/sec in performance modulo hiccups that can bring it down by a factor of 5. On a compute cluster instance (cc1.4xlarge) it's more like up to 300 MB/sec if you go up to 8 drives, since they provision more network bandwidth and seem to be able to cordon it off better with a placement group.
I love the idea behind EBS, a SAN makes life so much easier, but I too find that EBS glitches are the largest cause of unreliability in AWS. I'm not immediately planning to move out of AWS, but the trouble with EBS has certainly got me thinking about other options and has made me much less inclined to make an increased commitment to AWS.