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Why I Dislike EC2

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Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#111

Post by chii »

CoachRufus87 wrote: post #95
atto wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use AWS extensively, but to be completely fair, Netflix doesn't really care about operations costs. Yes, seriously. Their media licensing is so much more expensive, they do not optimize bang-for-buck, going as far as using larger instances (to avoid noisy neighbor problems) that are much less cost effective. So while AWS might be completely worth it for some people (it is for us), Netflix isn't the best argument :)…

"Netflix doesn't really care about operations costs." Considering that they're a publicly traded company, they have a fiduciary duty to watch all costs. Though server costs don't compare in relation to media licensing, I'm sure they pay some attention.

the same amount of attention paid to media licensing reduces more costs than the operational costs in hardware?

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#112

Post by tkw8 »

Afforess wrote: post #7

I agree with the author, EC2 seems really expensive compared to other clouds. One of the comments suggested DigitalOcean, which has much better pricing, and you can do flexible by the hour pricing and it has a rest API to bring up/down servers. /shameless shill + happy DO customer https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing https://api.digitalocean.com/

Whenever someone says $CLOUD costs less than EC2 it's always a very limited cloud with a small number of customers with a tiny fraction of a fraction of the features of AWS. It's never an Azure or a Rackspace.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#113

Post by lsh123 »

I've run the numbers for our PCI-compliant setup about 1.5 years ago and Amazon was about 3-4x more expensive than the average bid for my RFP for several smaller hosting providers for a mix of dedicated and virtual servers. Another thing I've discovered with AWS (again, it was 1.5 years ago) is a horrible network latencies even inside the same data center on the same VPC: on a "normal" gigabit switch in a dedicated setup I would expect stable ping So, my take on Amazon EC2: you want to use it when you are small (i.e. don't really care about performance) or when you are really big (when you can get "special" deal from Amazon and dedicate a lot of internal resources to make it work). In other cases a better option might be a mix of dedicated hardware (servers and networking stuff) and virtual servers at a managed hosting provider that would allow you to create the setup that works best for your project.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#114

Post by [deleted] »

Vitaly wrote: post #32

Any argument involving price seems to completely ignore TCO. We are using Heroku for most of our needs and suggest it to all our clients and we couldn't be happier to pay the premium over "expensive" AWS. We save a lot on IT and maintenance. Unless you are paying thousands of dollars per month, or your time is very cheap doing your own servers will cost you more. If AWS were so expensive and "not worth it" what are t…

[deleted]

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#115

Post by gaadd33 »

threeseed wrote: post #78
banachtarski wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just a question of speed. If your machines are slow, that means you need more machines to handle your throughput, which means you are paying for that 20 ms slowdown in actual dollars.

Not necessarily. AWS has a far superior network to almost anything else out there. Machine performance is not the only important part.

Just curious why you feel AWS has a better network than providers such as Equinix, Internap or Level3?

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#116

Post by tptacek »

CoachRufus87 wrote: post #95
atto wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use AWS extensively, but to be completely fair, Netflix doesn't really care about operations costs. Yes, seriously. Their media licensing is so much more expensive, they do not optimize bang-for-buck, going as far as using larger instances (to avoid noisy neighbor problems) that are much less cost effective. So while AWS might be completely worth it for some people (it is for us), Netflix isn't the best argument :)…

"Netflix doesn't really care about operations costs." Considering that they're a publicly traded company, they have a fiduciary duty to watch all costs. Though server costs don't compare in relation to media licensing, I'm sure they pay some attention.

That is not how fiduciary duty works. The company's duties require it to make good-faith decisions regarding spending, which can include a good-faith decision that it is not worth their time or energy to chase nickels and dimes.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#118

Post by aidos »

frozenport wrote: post #96
tzury wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's perhaps depend on the type of your customers/users, and their priorities. If you have "users", then you might be right, as no harm will be done, if once in a few years, their free service will be shutdown for 18 hours. However, if your customers are running core and critical parts of their business on your system, this part becomes a significant factor in the equation.

Another perspective: My nontechnical boss doesn't know about the 20ms difference (thinks her computer is slow?) but an outage is visible like the difference between day and night.

At 2s difference it's fair to say that a user is going to notice. Maybe even at 200ms. But at 20ms? I'm not sure that counts.

I know it's just a fabricated number but the point is that the server you're running on won't make a difference to the user experience. And, probably in the case of the differences were talking in these machines, a user would never notice it.

Edit: meant to say, I agree with you.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#119

Post by dorfsmay »

lsh123 wrote: post #113

I've run the numbers for our PCI-compliant setup about 1.5 years ago and Amazon was about 3-4x more expensive than the average bid for my RFP for several smaller hosting providers for a mix of dedicated and virtual servers. Another thing I've discovered with AWS (again, it was 1.5 years ago) is a horrible network latencies even inside the same data center on the same VPC: on a "normal" gigabit switch in a dedicated s…

Network latency is very inconsistent on EC2. This is a huge issue is you use a piece of software that assume that you are in a data centre with good networking, as you'd expect in an regular data centre.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#120

Post by davidbanham »

pjungwir wrote: post #107
ilaksh wrote: post #94

Do the small ec2 instances have the same performance problems as the micros? I just told my boss the other day I wasnt comfortable usings micros in production. Surely the smalls perform better?

Micros are really a completely different class from smalls and larges, because they offer "burst" performance. You shouldn't run anything in production on a micro, unless it's non-critical and not public-facing. Perhaps a 100% static web site, although even that I'm not sure about.

They can be appropriate for production workloads. You just need to understand the consequences of that burst performance. You also need to understand that you'll hit the invisible CPU usage limit without any notice.
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