Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS

That, $0.2cents/second of course, is on the margin. The real challenge to doing this is, of course, not the hardware/hvac/colo costs, but the several millions (tens of millions?) of dollars associated with building the software infrastructure required to scale/deploy the CPU/Storage/Services dynamically. And then there is the well staffed devops/NOC environment required. And the single-minded dedication to building these services so reliable, that you can run your primary business on. Oh, and course having a massively scaled business to both offset all those devops/noc/engineering efforts, and beta-test your scaling environment/server/storage infrastructure.

Other than Amazon, I can only think of Google being in a position in which such an enterprise can take off.

We tried this at Loudcloud, and it turns out you need more than a bunch of smart people, lots of money, and single-minded focus towards building on-demand infrastructure.

I recently tried out Joyent SmartOS for a NodeJS consulting gig I'm doing. After about 30 seconds, I killed the vm and switched to Ubuntu 12 server.

I don't care if SmartOS is 'faster' or has dtrace. The fact that it is missing basic things like top (no prstat isn't anything close to top) and 'standard' things like upstart made me want to run for the hills. The Joyent wiki documentation on SmartOS is abysmal at best. Even the pkgsrc repository system feels ancient and pales in comparison to what apt is. I have no desire to spend time re-inventing basic tools that linux has had for ages.

The image version of SmartOS w/ NodeJS isn't up-to-date with the latest Node release and it starts up MongoDB by default. While this may be good for just getting things running quickly, what happens if I don't want Mongo running at all? Generate my own images? No thanks.

I know, lots of hate... but it isn't all bad. Joyent as a cloud platform is great. Basic ab testing against NodeJS had me serving 9900 concurrent connections without any issues on their least expensive vm (which runs on a blazing fast network at 10gb/s). We were on Rackspace before and with a network limited to 20Mbps/s (at the lowest tier) we just couldn't get the throughput we needed.

tl;dr: SmartOS is a train wreck. Don't waste your time. Joyent as a platform is great. Why bother with EC2 when Joyent is faster and less expensive?

You can very easily install whatever version of Node.js you want using this bash script: https://gist.github.com/a0d40f1ff1679ed582a5. Also, MongoDB isn't even installed by default on the Node.js instance.

http://wiki.joyent.com/wiki/display/jpc2/SmartMachine+Node.j... v1.4.0 "This version now runs MongoDB by default"

As for your bash script... I stopped compiling binaries ages ago, why would I want to start again when I can just use Ubuntu and the official NodeJS PPA?

That's very interesting! I converted the prices to be in the same units and did some calculations for better comparison.

Linode Cost per day: $0.65 Time per image: 15.2 Images per day: 5684.2105263158 Cost per image: $0.0001143519 Images per dollar : 8744.9392712551

Storm-on-demand Cost per day: $1.2 Time per image: 13.05 Images per day: 6620.6896551724 Cost per image: $0.00018125 Images per dollar : 5517.2413793104

EC2-micro Cost per day: $0.84 Time per image: 168 Images per day: 514.2857142857 Cost per image: 0.0016333333 Images per dollar : 612.2448979592

EC2-small Cost per day: 2.16 Time per image: 63 Images per day: 1371.4285714286 Cost per image: 0.001575 Images per dollar : 634.9206349206

EC2-medium Cost per day: $4.464 Time per image: 12.13 Images per day: 7122.8359439407 Cost per image: 0.0006267167 Images per dollar : 1595.6173709545