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EC2 Dedicated Hosts

aws.amazon.com

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Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#121

Post by _urga »

res0nat0r wrote: post #118
_urga wrote: post #115

I have been with Hetzner since 1999, and I have hosted with AWS for 2 or 3 years, before moving back to Hetzner, and I keep wondering when AWS will have anything to match Hetzner's price/performance. Someone from AWS proactively called me up out of the blue the other day to ask for input and to interview me about what I need, and offered to quote. I received a phone call or two and two emails and after mentioning the…

How do you handle massive traffic spikes? Hetzner seems fine for small project / personal / small company websites with predictable load and people who have no problem spending time setting up all of their services they need themselves, it really just sounds like you just aren't the customer AWS wants to attract.

"How do you handle massive traffic spikes?"

Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin with.

If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late.

I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest that to build a scalable service you yourself would prefer to use servers with necessarily poor price/performance?

Or are you saying that it's not possible to use dedicated machines to build a scalable service? Or that one should only use VMs, with their inefficiency and resource contention? How do you reason about disk seek performance? What happens when the spike hits, and another AWS customer on the box starts stealing CPU?

Actually, traffic spikes were the reason we moved off AWS. A single dedicated machine at Hetzner gives 10x the headroom at a fraction of the cost. That buys you time and capacity when you need it.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#122

Post by jbverschoor »

nitrogen wrote: post #117
vidarh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I can still for most things get lower prices on a month by month basis than the price a 3 year commitment to Amazon gets you. And that's before paying their outright extortionate bandwidth prices.

If you have to hire an extra person to manage the new hardware, then you aren't saving money.

wake up

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#123

Post by tehmaco »

wtallis wrote: post #78
toomuchtodo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the hardware purchasing level Amazon operates with for AWS hardware, I'm sure they're able to (if they required it) spec custom BIOS requirements that perform integrity verification of subsystems before permitting power up to continue. Whether they do or not is a different question (although I'm sure someone could test this theory).

They could also just spec that firmware be stored on ROM rather than flash.

Or that a hardware jumper needs to be set on the motherboard before any firmware updates can be done.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#124

Post by LoSboccacc »

_urga wrote: post #121
res0nat0r wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle massive traffic spikes? Hetzner seems fine for small project / personal / small company websites with predictable load and people who have no problem spending time setting up all of their services they need themselves, it really just sounds like you just aren't the customer AWS wants to attract.

"How do you handle massive traffic spikes?" Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin with. If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest…

> If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late.

precisely. this is the other elephant in the AWS room. the only way to survive a spike without service degradation while vm spin up on that platform is through lambdas/s3 served pages/api gateway - but even lambdas lag behind traffic.

but then you need to build your whole architecture for it

anyway I'm running on AWS right now, but for other advantages and services, not for its scalability/price performance.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#125

Post by nikanj »

res0nat0r wrote: post #118
_urga wrote: post #115

I have been with Hetzner since 1999, and I have hosted with AWS for 2 or 3 years, before moving back to Hetzner, and I keep wondering when AWS will have anything to match Hetzner's price/performance. Someone from AWS proactively called me up out of the blue the other day to ask for input and to interview me about what I need, and offered to quote. I received a phone call or two and two emails and after mentioning the…

How do you handle massive traffic spikes? Hetzner seems fine for small project / personal / small company websites with predictable load and people who have no problem spending time setting up all of their services they need themselves, it really just sounds like you just aren't the customer AWS wants to attract.

Not everyone gets these massive traffic spikes. You don't have to be a small company to have easily predictable demand on production servers.

The company website can take a beating, but onboarding new customers takes weeks if not months. Plenty of time to plan and scale.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#126

Post by [deleted] »

bdcravens wrote: post #114
imaginenore wrote: post #98

That pricing is ridiculous though. I can get 15 Hetzner servers for the price of one EC2.

It's more than a bare metal server - you're still running EC2 instances atop of it, except only your instances are running on that server. Looking at the price of the underlying instances if you run it fully loaded, it seems pretty comparable running those instances non-dedicated.

[deleted]

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#127

Post by dagw »

cortesoft wrote: post #57
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.

So it is a feature designed for a silly license scheme?

Silly license schemes are annoyingly common and being able to deal with silly license schemes is a massive killer feature for very many people.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#128

Post by vidarh »

nitrogen wrote: post #117
vidarh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I can still for most things get lower prices on a month by month basis than the price a 3 year commitment to Amazon gets you. And that's before paying their outright extortionate bandwidth prices.

If you have to hire an extra person to manage the new hardware, then you aren't saving money.

In my experience, moving people off EC2 cuts down on the ops time they need, it doesn't increase it.

For one of my clients that I manage multiple racks in two different locations for with 150+ VMs, "managing the hardware" comes out to about 1-2 days a year in aggregate to bring new hardware in and wire it up (most of that is travel) + 20-30 minutes to investigate the very few issues we can't diagnose and fix via IPMI. I pop a server in, attaches power and ethernet, checks that the IPMI is reachable and that it sees the PXE server, and beyond that "managing the hardware" comes to yanking the occasional dead harddrive and inserting a new one, and ever now and again to confirm a server is dead.

Meanwhile with EC2 I see most of the same non-hardware issues (e.g. kernel panic, applications occasionally spinning out of control and taking a server down) that are just as trivial to handle via IPMI as via the EC2 console, but we also have to engineer around things like the lack of solid, stable, directly attached RAID arrays, which we don't need to worry about with the bare metal servers.

And no, EBS does not count - the number of times volumes have gotten stuck in attached state on a failed instance terrifies me. It also can't in any way match directly attached SSD RAID setups for performance which is another reason why it ends up taking more ops time: You end up with setups that simply take more vms to compensate for platform limitations.

I absolutely think EC2 is great for things like large batch jobs etc. where your requirements vary wildly, but most people don't even have enough daily variance for that to get anywhere near compensating for the cost of EC2 (and nothing stops you from deploying hybrid approaches - in fact I'm working on hybrid approaches mixing bare metal servers with EC2 to handle batch jobs and load spikes now)

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#129

Post by ownagefool »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #124
_urga wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How do you handle massive traffic spikes?" Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin with. If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest…

> If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late. precisely. this is the other elephant in the AWS room. the only way to survive a spike without service degradation while vm spin up on that platform is through lambdas/s3 served pages/api gateway - but even lambdas lag behind traffic. but then you need to build your whole architecture for it anyway I'm running on AWS right now, but f…

Baking your images and set your scaling thresholds lower should be able to largely deal with that.

The thing is though, the scaling is nice but most folks just want the auto-recovery. You stick your app over 3 zones, you have autoscaling and you can run with a couple of Ops savy devs and largely forget about it.

You no longer need to pay for that dedicated sysadmin who knows how to manage a datacentre when have a small number of technical staff. The extra hosting bills are less than hiring that other person.

Re: EC2 Dedicated Hosts

#130

Post by btb »

_urga wrote: post #115

I have been with Hetzner since 1999, and I have hosted with AWS for 2 or 3 years, before moving back to Hetzner, and I keep wondering when AWS will have anything to match Hetzner's price/performance. Someone from AWS proactively called me up out of the blue the other day to ask for input and to interview me about what I need, and offered to quote. I received a phone call or two and two emails and after mentioning the…

My main issue with hetzner is the lack of any sort of firewall in front of the servers. Your chosen OS is essentially directly exposed to the internet.
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