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Why I Dislike EC2

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Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#141

Post by CodeFoo »

jasonkester wrote: post #130

I sometimes feel like I'm the only one using EC2 as it was intended. S3stat's nightly job takes about 60 hours to run, and it needs to start and finish between 3am and 6am every morning. Amazon kindly keeps 20 machines ready to do that for me and only charges the time I'm actually using them. That's pretty amazing, and well worth the price in my mind. So yeah, if you need a box to run your webserver 24/7/365, you can…

> So yeah, if you need a box to run your webserver 24/7/365, you can find a better deal elsewhere. But that's really never been what EC2 is for.

What Amazon offering is? This is AWS we're talking about. They have a service solution for nearly everything. You're saying in 2013 they still don't have a service for 24/7/365 website hosting?

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#142

Post by count »

kppullin wrote: post #56
tzury wrote: post #29

1. AWS beats all others when it comes to security [1]. 2. EC2 is just one item in the package called AWS. Hence, if you just build something more than just "web-app with *db" at the back-end, say a full blown platform, then I know no other option for you to get the full stack integrated API for Data-warehouse, DNS, Load-balancing, auto-scaling, billing, etc. 3. Speed is sometimes over-rated. You should be be speedy w…

> 1. AWS beats all others when it comes to security [1]. While the compliance and security links are impressive, AWS still doesn't offer a BAA agreement for HIPAA/HITECH compliance. There are plenty of health care companies that are held back from AWS for this single reason. Surprisingly enough Microsoft is leading in this respect (or not, given their historical enterprise focus...) - http://www.windowsazure.com/en-u…

And there are plenty of health care companies that evaluate AWS and decide they don't need a BAA, due to the way the system is constructed. This is a 'your legal team' issue, not a global issue (ie: it's an issue, but not a blanket problem for everybody).

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#144

Post by stitchy »

I wish that the author had actually included a benchmark with nice pretty graphs. The list of example hardware is nice, but doesn't tell me nearly as much as a couple of benchmarks would. Blanket statements such as "EC2's price-to-performance ratio is horrible" don't really do much to convince me. Yeah, the author is probably correct. But to what extent is he correct?

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#145

Post by acdha »

saosebastiao wrote: post #39

As someone who loves EC2 (and happens to work for Amazon, but in a different domain), I can't figure out why people/companies haven't moved towards Hybrid Clouds. There are several strengths and weaknesses of the various providers, and the reward-to-risk ratio of locking yourself into one platform is just too small to matter. There are several scenarios where I could see myself using a combination of Rackspace + EC2…

The crazy part is that so far at the Amazon sales events I've attended the AWS staff frequently repeated the recommendation that you buy dedicated iron for your 24x7 workload and use EC2 for bursty jobs, usually pushing VPC as the way to tie everything together.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#146

Post by nirvdrum »

justincormack wrote: post #129
nirvdrum wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the whole thing is predicated on the 20ms slowdown coming from a slow machine, not network latency. And that's a pretty good assumption. Due to RAM limitations and abysmal performance, I could maybe push 15 concurrent requests on a c1.medium running a Rails app in Passenger with a non-CoW Ruby. Forking is terribly slow on EC2. An m1.small was out of the question.

But if you are using Rails you care more about convenience than performance anyway.

That's one way to look at it. Another is when this app started 3.5 years ago, Rails & the app had a drastically different performance profile and Amazon didn't have super-over-subscribed hardware. Not that it matters much, but there's nothing convenient about having to engineer around EC2. And doubling your capacity or constantly upgrading instance sizes is not cheap, nor a scalable solution in any practical sense.

Pick your language though. With terrible forking performance, any process-based execution environment is going to have similar issues. And I found running a servlet container on anything smaller than an m1.large to be an utter waste. 1.7 GB RAM isn't enough for many JVM-based apps and threading could easily overwhelm the system. Anything less than high I/O capacity just can't keep up.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#147

Post by acdha »

nirvdrum wrote: post #88
ejdyksen wrote: post #51

You also lose one of EC2's only advantage: per hour billing. This isn't true. Reserved instances still use per hour billing, just at a discounted rate.

That's not entirely accurate either. If you buy a heavy reserved instance you have to pay for every hour, whether or not you use it, for the length of the reservation. So, it's technically still per-hour billing at a discounted rate, but you gain absolutely nothing by shutting down a machine.

What you described is not true, however, for light or medium reservations where shutting down a machine means you have no cost.

The other key difference is that reservations apply to hours used, not specific instances, which means you can do things like buy heavy instances for your 100% utilization level and medium for the amount beyond that which you commonly but not always use.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#148

Post by jaynate »

mva wrote: post #138

First, people seem to think EC2 saves you time and hassle. Compared to collocated servers, this is true. But compared to dedicated servers, managed or unmanaged, it simply isn't. Hardware fails? They'll replace it (at no cost). I totally disagree. OK, maybe it takes a bit more time to set everything up, but when you have it all up and running (AMI's, Autoscaling, etc.) you have a robust setup that can scale when you…

In that case I would say you have architected an app for aws, then, and we should be careful not to do that for portability's sake. Http://www.12factor.net/backing-services

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#149

Post by nirvdrum »

CodeFoo wrote: post #141
jasonkester wrote: post #130

I sometimes feel like I'm the only one using EC2 as it was intended. S3stat's nightly job takes about 60 hours to run, and it needs to start and finish between 3am and 6am every morning. Amazon kindly keeps 20 machines ready to do that for me and only charges the time I'm actually using them. That's pretty amazing, and well worth the price in my mind. So yeah, if you need a box to run your webserver 24/7/365, you can…

> So yeah, if you need a box to run your webserver 24/7/365, you can find a better deal elsewhere. But that's really never been what EC2 is for. What Amazon offering is? This is AWS we're talking about. They have a service solution for nearly everything. You're saying in 2013 they still don't have a service for 24/7/365 website hosting?

I know you were asking for effect, but of course they do and it's EC2. That's why they have a heavy reservation pricing tier, which only makes sense for 24/7/365 (you pay for hours even if you don't use them).

But, it's fun to point at "elastic" and tell people they're "doing it wrong" because they don't take a name chosen 7 years ago literally. As if somehow the service (called EC2 virtually everywhere -- not Elastic Cloud Compute) could never evolve beyond that initial use case. Incidentally, the "elastic" in EBS must have a different meaning because one of its primary selling points is that it's persistent storage.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#150

Post by nirvdrum »

acdha wrote: post #147
nirvdrum wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not entirely accurate either. If you buy a heavy reserved instance you have to pay for every hour, whether or not you use it, for the length of the reservation. So, it's technically still per-hour billing at a discounted rate, but you gain absolutely nothing by shutting down a machine.

What you described is not true, however, for light or medium reservations where shutting down a machine means you have no cost. The other key difference is that reservations apply to hours used, not specific instances, which means you can do things like buy heavy instances for your 100% utilization level and medium for the amount beyond that which you commonly but not always use.

I made no claim otherwise about light or medium instances. I was merely pointing out that for many people Amazon is no longer a purely pay-per-hour or pay-for-what-you-use service. Many people overlook the wording change made for heavy reservations. The parent's refutation of the article isn't as cut and try as stated.
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