Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

remcobron.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 116 posts

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#101

Post by bluedino »

shuzchen wrote: post #77
leetrout wrote: post #51

I am always surprised Rackspace Cloud Servers are left out. We've been using them for over a year with only a handful of outages (VM host reboots- 3~5min each). For us it is worth the price (>$40/mo for 1 GB ram) for great stability and support. The Openstack API is really nice, too.

I've used Rackspace cloud both when it used to be called Slicehost and after the full transition to the Rackspace brand. In my experience past and present, you get a better deal dollar for dollar with Linode (better disk, network, and cpu performance). Personally, the only reason I'd use Rackspace cloud would be as a part of their hybrid offering.

Good call - lease a bigger 16-core 32GB box such as your database server on their managed hosting platform (not cheap), and then just spin up cloud instances connected to that server using RackConnect which seems to be some fancy, cumbersome routing/vlan monstrosity.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#102

Post by bluedino »

ignostic wrote: post #98
oogali wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? My intended tone was not "don't try", but "try harder". I've listed at least 5 ways to improve/normalize the testing, as well as linking to a document that does a pretty good job of explaining statistics (particularly, how programmers do a bad job of statistics; baselines for benchmarks; etc). "At least he's out there trying" -- with this not-so-great benchmarking, the author has just effectively SHITTED o…

It's true: you don't say something like "Well, Amazon just sucks." without backing the statement up with something more credible. As someone a little less savvy on the topic I'm glad to know that the test wasn't even close to the final word and why. Thank you. It's probably also true that your tone is more abrasive than it needs to be.

Part of the problem is a benchmark like this, put together with plain ignorance, and published on the web will give people who don't know any better all kinds of false perceptions.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#103

Post by bluedino »

corresation wrote: post #31
bryanlarsen wrote: post #14

Did you try multiple instances on each provider? Performance between VPS's from the same provider varies wildly. If there are 64 VPS's on a server, you will probably get a lot more than 1/64th of the processing power of that server because most of the other VPS's are idle. But how much more than 1/64th you get will vary wildly from machine to machine.

Performance between VPS's from the same provider varies wildly. This absolutely should not be true, and in my experience it isn't true on Amazon -- you will neither be starved for resources if others do intensive things, nor will you enjoy riches if they are quiet: You will get what you are paying for. I have a personal experience from Digital Ocean that is a bit different. Firstly let me say that I think they have a…

Is his simple benchmark even hitting the disks?

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#105

Post by Legion »

longbeard wrote: post #89
Legion wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, that's an infrastructure smell.

How would you ensure that an instance launched on hardware bought 6 months ago is identical to the hardware under an instance launched N years ago and still running? Buy old hardware on eBay to prevent newer hardware introducing variation?

I would start with a provisioning process that isn't completely opaque about such things.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#106

Post by numbsafari »

oogali wrote: post #47

sigh I call these "weekend benchmarks" -- what you'd typically do when you have a block of free time, then spend time optimizing for said benchmark. Roll in on Monday with some staggering results, only to find one (or many) of your variables were off. Did the author try multiple instances on each provider? VM tenancy is a bitch. (Think of how annoyed you get at the noise levels, when your neighbor in the next apartme…

Honest Question: Why not launch your app's infrastructure on both platforms and then round-robin your traffic between the two for a billing cycle and compare the results at the end?

If you are working towards "best practices" on AWS, you should be running multi-region (who wants to be the one left holding the bag when US-EAST goes down again?). If you've done all the heavy lifting to enable yourself to run in "pods" across mutliple regions.

Well, if you can do that, why not treat Linode/DO/Rackspace as a separate region and deploy a "pod" of servers there?

At the end of a month you should have enough statistics that are directly applicable to your own app and your specific customers, as well as some real experience with the operational experience of dealing with the new provider.

For example, maybe one of the other providers has really fast machines and their major upstream provider has a great peering relationship with whatever test node you were using for these microbenchmarks, but perhaps those servers are really flaky and crash all the time, or perhaps the majority of your customers see really bad latency when hitting those servers? Maybe their API isn't just "immature", maybe it crashes a lot and they have bad customer service.

Those are the sorts of things you aren't going to figure out after simply running a few load tests. Anyhow, it just seems like something like this would be a lot more valuable than any amount of synthetic testing.

edit: typos

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#107

Post by res0nat0r »

barista wrote: post #92
kingkilr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing you should be more wary of than a benchmark that matches your pre-existing intuition. It'll lead you to ignore serious methodological issues, without any sound scientific (or any other epistemological) reason. https://speakerdeck.com/alex/benchmarking is a slide deck I gave at my office on how to do better benchmarking EDIT: I should probably mention I work at Rackspace, and thus everything I say on…

Well AWS is slow is not surprise, there was an article on HN in last couple of weeks that pitted Azure against AWS and AWS was faster hands down. So this is no surprise at least to me.

This statement is exactly the problem he is describing. :) One metric for a specific use case or scenario is a terrible indicator of overall "quality". It is much more nuanced than that. I think the worst tickets I've gotten in the 10 years sofar sysadmining is when a customer just states their app is "slow".

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#108

Post by barista »

res0nat0r wrote: post #107
barista wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well AWS is slow is not surprise, there was an article on HN in last couple of weeks that pitted Azure against AWS and AWS was faster hands down. So this is no surprise at least to me.

This statement is exactly the problem he is describing. :) One metric for a specific use case or scenario is a terrible indicator of overall "quality". It is much more nuanced than that. I think the worst tickets I've gotten in the 10 years sofar sysadmining is when a customer just states their app is "slow".

There are other studies that have compared the offerings on multiple benchmarks as well. Here's the one I was referring to: https://zapier.com/engineering/quick-redis-benchmark-aws-vs-... see the comparison for yourself on multiple benchmarks.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#110

Post by res0nat0r »

barista wrote: post #108
res0nat0r wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This statement is exactly the problem he is describing. :) One metric for a specific use case or scenario is a terrible indicator of overall "quality". It is much more nuanced than that. I think the worst tickets I've gotten in the 10 years sofar sysadmining is when a customer just states their app is "slow".

There are other studies that have compared the offerings on multiple benchmarks as well. Here's the one I was referring to: https://zapier.com/engineering/quick-redis-benchmark-aws-vs-... see the comparison for yourself on multiple benchmarks.

Yes in simplistic terms for a specific metric I'm sure other providers have better hardware than AWS, if that is all one wants to base their value of "better" on then so be it, but that is pretty naive.

Many argue that the AWS ecosystem (25 services at last count) and the extensive featureset of AWS outweigh the bare bones "fast" metrics of other providers.

I think like the poster above is mentioning...there is generally more to it than a simple metric or two sampled a few times from a single endpoint. But I guess it all lies on ones definition of what they consider valuable...

Post reply on HN