Why I Dislike EC2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#181

Post by nasalgoat » Tue, Jun 04, 2013, 5:45 PM UTC

tzury wrote: post #77

nasalgoat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and yes, we're using a CDN. Neither of those change that EC2 instances are slow and have unreliable performance, and the network is abstracted to the point where you can't effectively control packet flow.

EC2 will not become faster. However, at least, for web traffic, CPU and IO are not the only factors. Network is, in fact, a major player in the latency, and by being globally distributed, configuring Route53 appropriately, and integrating CloudFront CDN, a given web-app gets a boost that I doubt a faster computer can beat.

We experimented with EC2 in the early stages to use as a possible load failover, and no matter what we did, we could never get better than 150ms ping times even between internal zones.

The EC2 network also has mysterious packet filtering on it that prevented IPSec tunnels from working correctly.

I've managed to leverage CDN and globally distributed servers for a fraction of the cost of Amazon services just fine, and I have the added benefit of 100% full control of all aspects of it, including the network.

A good analogy is that EC2 is like an interpreted language versus compiled - you can get a lot done and it's easier to get started, but if you're really serious about performance, you need to program in C.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#182

Post by clouddurden » Tue, Jun 04, 2013, 7:10 PM UTC

The amount of FUD in this article, and on this thread are amazing.

The folks who claim it is more expensive to run AWS over on-premises infrastructure are either not counting their total costs (power, staff, off-site data storage, co-location) or not architecting things properly on AWS.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#183

Post by bifrost » Tue, Jun 04, 2013, 7:21 PM UTC

Lets take the m2.4xlarge reserved instance type, it costs somewhere around $2k/month on AWS, but with a "generic hosting provider" it costs about %10-15 of that. Don't forget the 5-20% virtualization performance penalty either. The tradeoff is that for $2k you can get it pretty quickly and shut it down whenever you want, but if you spend more than 80hrs a month with that in use you should really get a dedicated resource somewhere else...

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#184

Post by admbk » Tue, Jun 04, 2013, 10:08 PM UTC

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…

Most organizations when they try to use AWS or Rackspace as a mere extension of their datacenter - discover that is quite hard, and that their apps require extensive redesign to fit the new environment. This in turn leads to the lock-in and lack of flexibility.

I think this blog post touches on the phenomenon: http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/the-unbearable-lightness-...

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#185

Post by regularfry » Tue, Jun 04, 2013, 10:11 PM UTC

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.

Right up until you don't.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#186

Post by regularfry » Tue, Jun 04, 2013, 10:45 PM UTC

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…

> Unless you are paying thousands of dollars per month, or your time is very cheap doing your own servers will cost you more.

This is down to familiarity of tooling, not some intrinsic advantage that EC2 has over managed dedicated hosting. The simple matter is that there just isn't the maturity of tools around automated provisioning of dedicated hosts, which makes them seem higher overhead.

> If AWS were so expensive and "not worth it" what are the guys from Netflix smoking? ;)

Simple: Netflix have very bursty load, so it costs them less to pay the EC2 and virtualisation premium than it would to keep an equivalent amount of dedicated hardware on warm standby. Is your load bursty? Then EC2 might make sense.

EC2 (or any cloud virtualisation platform) will always lose in a shootout with managed dedicated hardware, unless the shootout parameters are provisioning time and tooling, simply because EC2 is managed dedicated hardware plus an extra layer of stuff on top that has to be paid for.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#187

Post by pitchups » Tue, Jun 04, 2013, 11:30 PM UTC

pitchups wrote: post #36

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…

We use Softlayer too for the same reasons. Have been with them for over 10 years now - since they were called The Planet. Just had one hardware failure during the entire time. They also now offer Cloud computing instances - which can be deployed either hourly or monthly. And you can mix and match your Cloud and dedicated servers - giving you all the flexibility to scale that you get with AWS / EC2.

Our own experience with their Cloud offering is more recent and a bit different. We have been using cloud computing instances running Haproxy as load balancers to route millions of requests to multiple physical web servers for over a year now. Can't generalize - but we have had no problems so far.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#188

Post by banachtarski » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 12:12 AM UTC

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.

This has nothing at all to do with the network. Also, amazon's machine to machine network internally is flaky.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#189

Post by Spooky23 » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 4:27 AM UTC

boas wrote: post #174

Spooky23 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, contracts with most medical companies or governments handling HIPPA data disagree.

Do you sign business associate agreements with your colo facility, ISP, and landlord? They also are physically capable of accessing your data, even though they are legally or contractually forbidden from doing so.

The orgs that I have worked with draw the line somewhere between colo and ISP. Anyone with potential access to unencrypted network traffic or whom is operating equipment containing affected data. Usually the lawyers can agree to contractural terms for the landlord without a BAA

I'm not arguing that it makes sense, just that it happens.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#190

Post by kc5tja » Wed, Jun 05, 2013, 5:27 PM UTC

theg2 wrote: post #163

neya wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I may ask, how long ago was this? Thanks.