EC2 Dedicated Hosts • Hacker News Board

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#101

Post by motoboi » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 3:01 AM UTC

triggercut wrote: post #91

This is great for (warning: potentially limited use case ahead) engineering companies* who run large analysis clusters for specialty Simulation/CFD software. Especially those frustrated by their vendors current or (non-existent) cloud processing offerings. A lot of software in this space, for instance, has a fixed MAC address requirement for their license servers, and you report/pay depending on the number of cores.…

Other place where this is great is enterprise cloud migration and hybrid cloud formation.

When one decides to go cloud, you need to throw away you prior investment in SO licenses and hardware. Although you have no alternative but throw away hardware, being able to reuse investment in software greatly reduce migration costs.

Of course one can just wait until all his licenses expire and then migrate, but such a hard migration would increase risks.

And of course it would be nice to have a price comparison between running normal instances and using a dedicated host with my own licenses, but without deeper inspection, dedicated is cheaper.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#102

Post by modoc » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 3:22 AM UTC

motoboi wrote: post #99

jeffbarr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of our customers have asked for this feature so that they can run software that is licensed for a particular piece of actual hardware.

Could you list some examples?

Many Oracle products must be licensed for all the physical hardware they run on, irrespective of VMs (unless you're running OracleVM).

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#103

Post by toomuchtodo » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 3:24 AM UTC

teraflop wrote: post #81

toomuchtodo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll agree with this attack vector, although it'd be trivial to have your PXE boot routine between customers re-apply known good firmware to the NIC and disk controller and verify with checksums (unless there's a 0-day out there for the NIC controller, in which case you're owned regardless).

Normally the PXE boot code is, itself, stored in firmware.

Whatever components start first, wins. If the PXE boot code is in the NIC, you can theoretically verify the rest of the system first. If its in the BIOS, the BIOS needs to trust the NIC as untrusted/determine if its compromised or not.

Security is hard :/

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#104

Post by mentat » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 3:44 AM UTC

boulos wrote: post #75

Interesting: > each Dedicated Host can accommodate one or more instances of a particular type, all of which must be the same size I'm surprised by the "same size" requirement. It seems like even if you ask customers to stay within a single family (m3, m4, etc.) the customer could do their own hand placement of 8 vCPUs next to a pair of 4s... Edit: Disclaimer, I work on Compute Engine.

It probably simplifying the fitting if they just line up a Host targeted request with a dedicated host of that type.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#105

Post by mentat » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 3:46 AM UTC

knite wrote: post #19

What's the networking model? Will two instances on the same host talk over the datacenter network, or will the traffic stay local to the machine?

Given placement groups I'd expect 10 GB local networking as this is the same thing.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#106

Post by benley » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 4:05 AM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #53

bonobo3000 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind explaining a little about how bare metal is different from this? Isn't a dedicated host a real physical machine?

No I think it's still virtualised isn't it? But on a machine that they guarantee only you are using?

Yes. The key is that you can control exactly what combination of your own VMs land on each physical machine.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#107

Post by lobster_johnson » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 4:12 AM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #94

lobster_johnson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Hetzner, but I didn't think they had any datacenters in the US.

I don't believe they do. If you want a US datacenter, consider LeaseWeb. They're a Dutch company but offer servers in DC and San Jose.

Looks alright, but their server selection is a bit limited (and hard to navigate, just a big list that doesn't even filter properly).

For example, if I want 128GB RAM and SSD disks, their prices suddenly go up to thousands of dollars per month because they're all some kind of beefy Dell or HP, whereas Hetzner can give me a single-processor, 6-core Xeon E5-1650 3.4GHz + 128GB RAM + 960GB SSD for $123/mo. LeaseWeb has cheaper SuperMicros, but they either max out at 32GB, or they don't have SATA disks. They're skewed very differently: With Hetzner you can't pick "less RAM, lots of CPUs" and LeaseWeb doesn't have "lots of RAM, fewer CPUs, SSDs".

A vendor like this needs to offer a much wider range of specs to be worth investing one's entire infrastructure in, to be honest.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#108

Post by latch » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 5:04 AM UTC

lobster_johnson wrote: post #49

idlewords wrote: post #5

All the advantages of a dedicated server without the hassle of saving tons of money.

Are there any good, dependable, modern alternatives if you don't want to deal with the hardware, and also don't need "scale on demand"? The only name I know is SoftLayer, which is certainly not cheap.

There's thousands of choices, most have been in business since before AWS has existed, and almost all of them will give you much better (2x-16x) bang for your money (Even on a small order, you can (or could) negotiate SoftLayer's down by ~50%).

Ones that I'm personally familiar with: Hivelocity in Florida ReliableSite in NY WebNX in LA 100TB (a SL reseller in some locations, and they own their own in others) OVH (lower quality, lower price, great for various workloads, NA data center) Hetzner (Germany)

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#109

Post by lobster_johnson » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 5:11 AM UTC

latch wrote: post #108

lobster_johnson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any good, dependable, modern alternatives if you don't want to deal with the hardware, and also don't need "scale on demand"? The only name I know is SoftLayer, which is certainly not cheap.

There's thousands of choices, most have been in business since before AWS has existed, and almost all of them will give you much better (2x-16x) bang for your money (Even on a small order, you can (or could) negotiate SoftLayer's down by ~50%). Ones that I'm personally familiar with: Hivelocity in Florida ReliableSite in NY WebNX in LA 100TB (a SL reseller in some locations, and they own their own in others) OVH (low…

Yes, that's why I'm asking. There's surely tons of potential differences, in reliability, redundancy options, turnaround time for new boxes, selection of configurations (including recently released hardware and things like GPUs), networking options, backbone connectivity, software services, multiple data centers (so you only need to pay/deal with one vendor) etc.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#110

Post by zaroth » Tue, Nov 24, 2015, 5:19 AM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #15

20years wrote: post #12

Can anyone give me the advantages of choosing an EC2 dedicated host over going with a true dedicated server?

All the rest of your infrastructure is in AWS and you want the high interconnect speeds.

If it was just about network speed, it would be cheaper to get the direct 10G cross-connection to Amazon's network than to pay the premium for the dedicated hardware.