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Why I Dislike EC2

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Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#161

Post by bad_user »

nirvdrum wrote: post #159
bad_user wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on a web service (build on top of Scala and the JVM) that's handling between 1500 and 3000 reqs per second per c1.medium instance, with an average time per request of under 15ms. This is real traffic, with the web service receiving between 16,000 and 30,000 total requests per second during the day. A c1.xlarge can do 7000 reqs per second or even more, but for the moment I felt like the difference in prici…

I just wanted to add -- since you're not the first to point out the Rails part -- that I've also run a 42 node Cassandra cluster on a m1.xlarges and did a fair bit of CPU-bound operations (encryption and compression) on hundreds of TB of data on cc2.8xlarge. I just used the Rails one as an example. In the case of Cassandra, disk I/O was a constant issue. So, we grew the cluster much larger than would be necessary on…

Yeah, I feel you dude. I also experienced I/O issues.

Unfortunately we also need auto-scaling capabilities and map-reducers and stuff. Maybe Google's new "Compute Engine" service will prove to be better.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#162

Post by theg2 »

dangrossman wrote: post #4

On top of paying 8x what it cost before/after I moved from/back to Softlayer, AWS services just didn't work right. EBS failed often. RDS, which runs on top of EBS, would fail often too. When an entire AZ failed, despite paying double the hourly rate for "Multi-AZ" instances that were supposed to automatically fail over to another zone, nothing failed over, it just failed. If I need on-demand instances these days, I'l…

Counter to your point, RDS, EBS, and all of our services have never failed even when we went under extreme load last month.

Its computing and hardware, absolutely everything fails eventually.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#163

Post by theg2 »

neya wrote: post #131
dangrossman wrote: post #4

On top of paying 8x what it cost before/after I moved from/back to Softlayer, AWS services just didn't work right. EBS failed often. RDS, which runs on top of EBS, would fail often too. When an entire AZ failed, despite paying double the hourly rate for "Multi-AZ" instances that were supposed to automatically fail over to another zone, nothing failed over, it just failed. If I need on-demand instances these days, I'l…

How does Rackspace work? Do they work just like Linode or are they an AWS competitor? I heard some good reviews about them, but not sure...Anyone here on Rackspace who could give us some pluses and minuses of the service?

We were on Rackspace before moving to AWS. Their sales person flat out told us on our contract renewal call that the only thing they could compete with AWS with was customer service.

I appreciated their honestly but they were lacking a few required services for us at the time.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#164

Post by theg2 »

weitzj wrote: post #135
dangrossman wrote: post #4

On top of paying 8x what it cost before/after I moved from/back to Softlayer, AWS services just didn't work right. EBS failed often. RDS, which runs on top of EBS, would fail often too. When an entire AZ failed, despite paying double the hourly rate for "Multi-AZ" instances that were supposed to automatically fail over to another zone, nothing failed over, it just failed. If I need on-demand instances these days, I'l…

AWS best practices: plan for EBS to fail plan for RDS to fail 'snapshot early snapshot often', as snapshots will help you in case of a failure there is no automatic snapshot functionality ( yet? ) plan how to snapshot an EBS RAID (Filesystem, uptime)

RDS and EBS both snapshot automatically.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#165

Post by CoachRufus87 »

tptacek wrote: post #116
CoachRufus87 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I stated that a responsable fiduciary monitors where they spend their money. This then allows them to make good-faith decisions. I never said that they're trying to chase nickels and dimes on the ops front.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#166

Post by papsosouid »

vidarh wrote: post #20
adrr wrote: post #2

People use EC2 not because of price but flexibility. A good example: When we launch a product and expect lots of traffic, i can quadruple my server count in a few minutes. Once the event is over with, i can spin them down. I can't do this with traditional hosting.

You can get that flexibility without putting your base load on EC2: Use EC2 (or your "normal" hosts cloud services) to spin up extra servers when needed, and host your base load elsewhere. Extra bonus: It allows you to save even more money by flying closer to the wire with your long-term provisioned servers. These days there are so many hosts that offer combination of colo + dedicated servers + cloud services that yo…

Right, I can just spin up EC2 instances which have to access my database in a whole different datacenter. That will certainly solve my problems!

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#167

Post by twic »

Goladus wrote: post #157
nirvdrum wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Elasti…

In other words they took a system targeted especially at people who needed on-demand computing and as it got popular, adapted it to the needs of the 24/7/365 web-hosting by offering an alternate pricing model , point-and-click user interfaces and additional features and services like EBS and CloudWatch. The point is absolutely not that EC2 never evolved beyond its initial use case and isn't good at other things. The…

Because EC2 still seems to be a lot of people's default option for 24/365 servers, even though it isn't particularly good for it. Why is that so? Evidently there haven't been enough blog posts on the subject yet!

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#168

Post by twic »

nirvdrum wrote: post #149
CodeFoo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Elasti…

Presumably, the elasticity in EBS is in the amount of storage. Rather as the elasticity in EC2 is in the amount of compute.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#169

Post by papsosouid »

I see these complaints a lot, and they are certainly accurate, but they miss the point. I use AWS because when an app server explodes, a new one is automatically spun up and added to the load balancer pool. The OS image is loaded from s3, which I don't have to worry about backing up. The app is loaded from s3, the templates are loaded from s3. I don't have to do anything. I would absolutely love to use dedicated hardware for the consistent performance. But where can I get dedicated hardware that lets me provision new servers automatically and have them running with our custom OS image in minutes?

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#170

Post by rscale »

jd007 wrote: post #30
rscale wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was shocked when I learned that many EC2 users with highly variable traffic don't spin down during off-peak because sometimes Amazon has problems that prevent them from spinning their instances back up. I love the idea of their cloud services, but the reality is a decidedly less attractive beast.

Hmm I would like to hear more about these problems that prevent people from spinning up instances. Is it a frequently occurring problem or only happens rarely (e.g. when APIs are down). Also are they managing the instances themselves or using EC2's AutoScaling cluster? I run a dynamically scaling cluster on EC2 and have not run into the problems like you mentioned, so I would like to hear more about them if possible.…

It's due to rarely occurring problems such as APIs down/unresponsive, insufficient/incorrect instances available, and a third major class of problem that's frustrating my memory at the moment. In addition to not scaling up and down (automatically or manually), many of these apps are architected to require as little from AWS as is possible to reduce their exposure. For example, they'll refrain from using ELB because ELB depends on EBS.

These decisions were made by companies that started off believing fully in the promise of elasticity, and gradually shifted to less elastic architectures as they experienced issues. That said, it's worth noting that these are firms with very high costs of downtime, so the magnitude of failures was very high.

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