Why we moved away from AWS • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#11

Post by karli » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:23 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #9

1. A Correction to that post is there isn't MANY provider that are around the same price. He said Hetzner. And that is like the ONLY other provider for the same price. And in many cases OVH offers better value then Hetzner. 2. The problem the post mention about OVH not being elastic. That is simply true with every other dedicated provider. ( Actually StormOnDemand offers Dedicated at per minutes pricing ) . But OVH s…

There are more provider like http://www.redstation.com/ but we have only experience with Hetzner & OVH, so i cannot say something about the other ones.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#12

Post by dergachev » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:24 PM UTC

OVH actually supports running the Proxmox virtualization distro on their servers. That means you can easily get a 32GB dedicated server with raid1 SSDs (around $100/month here in Canada) and spin up VMs to your heart's content. Proxmox also supports running your host nodes in a cluster, which allows for live migration. And if the math isn't already ridiculous, keep in mind that all the running OpenVZ containers (which proxmox supports) actually share a single kernel, and thus share a good chunk of RAM.

That being said, OVH is notorious for lack of support, and my experience so far (6 months) suggests that using them is not without risk. So at the moment I'm automating everything so that if an OVH engineer does decide to accidentally pull the plug on my server(s), I can failover in an hour or two.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#13

Post by leokun » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:26 PM UTC

If you move to Rackspace, stay away from DWS, the dallas datacenter. It's over-booked, the network has constant issues, vm's on the same host machine as you are able to cause your vm network issues, the list of problems never stops.

We recently switched to Azure from Rackspace, but we're still evaluating if it will work for us long term. Azure's issues are that you have to request number of core increases, and you can't capture an image of a vm without shutting it down. Also you can't just give your VM a regular ssh public key, you have to generate SSL like certs. Also weird is a lot of the documentation is only for the Windows side of things, even though you can get some of that stuff to work on linux and that you can do that by installing an SDK even though you might not be installing an application, just running your own stuff on a VM.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#14

Post by UK-AL » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:29 PM UTC

rb2k_ wrote: post #6

AWS isn't really a solution for people trying to run a "small" project on a fixed amount of servers 24/7. It's great if you want to be able to: - provision lots of machines without delays - launch and terminate new instances to cover load spikes - do geo-redundant failover (aka: a datacenter in Europe, Australia, the US, ...) - have 'plug and play' components like load balancers (ELB), storage (S3), databases (RDS),…

I would have thought build slaves would be a great fit for AWS, since you can boot them up as needed, and turn them off when not needed(Night).

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#15

Post by thejosh » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:32 PM UTC

leokun wrote: post #13

If you move to Rackspace, stay away from DWS, the dallas datacenter. It's over-booked, the network has constant issues, vm's on the same host machine as you are able to cause your vm network issues, the list of problems never stops. We recently switched to Azure from Rackspace, but we're still evaluating if it will work for us long term. Azure's issues are that you have to request number of core increases, and you ca…

How many server(s) did you have with RS?

We only have 2 mid-sized virtual servers in DFW and things have been working flawlessly for us..

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#16

Post by jcastro » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:33 PM UTC

karli wrote: post #10

eterm wrote: post #4

EC2 was designed for elastic computing. On demand high computation (low memory) that are elastic. With that in mind, pure EC2 is a terrible choice for general web application hosting. If using the complete AWS set (S3, simpleDB, etc) then it makes more sense as stuff like db hosting can be pushed out to their services designed for it, but if you're gonna fire up a windows box, stick SQL server on there and use it as…

As i said in the blogpost, we still love AWS, its awesome, we used it for many other projects and S3 is great in combination with EC2, but in some cases it makes sense to think about it, maybe it saves you something! As i said, we really miss the simplicity of AWS, one mouse click and you have a loadbalancer, ec. PS: trust me, AWS EBS volume can die, and this is a pain! :)

I think the trick here is figuring out how much day-to-day workload you can host in a more traditional cost-effective way and how much elastic workload you can use EC2 for.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#17

Post by hashtree » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:33 PM UTC

eminh wrote: post #3

I currently spend ~$2000 on Softlayer for six servers and use about 30TB of bandwidth. On AWS I would have paid more just for that bandwidth.

And you can pay much less than half that via custom server builds and colocation. It is just a matter of how far down the chain you want to go, given your expertise and sensitivity to hardware costs.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#18

Post by krallin » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:33 PM UTC

rb2k_ wrote: post #6

AWS isn't really a solution for people trying to run a "small" project on a fixed amount of servers 24/7. It's great if you want to be able to: - provision lots of machines without delays - launch and terminate new instances to cover load spikes - do geo-redundant failover (aka: a datacenter in Europe, Australia, the US, ...) - have 'plug and play' components like load balancers (ELB), storage (S3), databases (RDS),…

For larger companies that usually don't rely on VPS providers and the like, AWS can still be a compelling offering for new ventures, as you don't have to commit resources (capital) to in-house infrastructure for a project that might not work out (as it's opex, not capex, just shut it down if it fails).

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#19

Post by karli » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:36 PM UTC

jcastro wrote: post #16

karli wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As i said in the blogpost, we still love AWS, its awesome, we used it for many other projects and S3 is great in combination with EC2, but in some cases it makes sense to think about it, maybe it saves you something! As i said, we really miss the simplicity of AWS, one mouse click and you have a loadbalancer, ec. PS: trust me, AWS EBS volume can die, and this is a pain! :)

I think the trick here is figuring out how much day-to-day workload you can host in a more traditional cost-effective way and how much elastic workload you can use EC2 for.

Yes, thats exactly the trick! With our previous startup we spent around $60K/year for AWS :)

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#20

Post by samspenc » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:37 PM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #8

AWS is just not very cost-effective in terms of performance per dollar, especially when it comes to storage performance (my own specialty). It only appears that they are because of the hourly billing and a human inability to compare quantities across nearly three orders of magnitude (hours vs. months) intuitively. Now that there are hundreds of vendors with hourly billing, as there have been for a while, it's easy to…

Agreed, the features/cost tradeoff is why we're still with AWS!