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Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS

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Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS

#21

Post by bcantrill »

latchkey wrote: post #13

I recently tried out Joyent SmartOS for a NodeJS consulting gig I'm doing. After about 30 seconds, I killed the vm and switched to Ubuntu 12 server. I don't care if SmartOS is 'faster' or has dtrace. The fact that it is missing basic things like top (no prstat isn't anything close to top) and 'standard' things like upstart made me want to run for the hills. The Joyent wiki documentation on SmartOS is abysmal at best.…

For whatever it's worth, we are very actively working to make SmartOS a more hospitable environment to those coming from other systems. I'm not sure if you're interested in the details here (after all, it sounds like you might have spent longer on the HN comment than on the "30 seconds" with SmartOS), but if you provision the default base smartos64 image (currently version 1.6.3), "top" is available via pkgsrc ("pkgin in top"). Not only that, but due to popular demand, we've also ported "htop" to SmartOS ("pkgin in htop"). In terms of node.js version, I think what you're referring to is the node found in the base platform (/usr/bin/node), not the node available via pkgsrc (which will appear as /opt/local/bin/node). This is definitely a point of confusion, and we've rectified it in the next version of our software by not having the node version that we use in the base platform be visible to SmartMachines (that is, there isn't a /usr/bin/node).

More generally, we're definitely committed to making SmartOS the best environment for the modern cloud; I'm sorry that your experience was frustrating, and if you have any additional concrete feedback on what you'd like to see improved, we're all ears. And finally, I know you said that you "don't care" about DTrace, but I just can't help my (biased) self; if you're developing a node.js app, you really should check out some of the things that SmartOS can uniquely do with respect to node:

http://dtrace.org/blogs/dap/2012/04/25/profiling-node-js/

http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2012/05/05/debugging-node-js-mem...

Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS

#22

Post by EwanToo »

ghshephard wrote: post #11
ChuckMcM wrote: post #5

From the article (its conclusion) : "Amazon need to lift their game in terms of CPU performance. They offer a great service that obviously extends far beyond a simple CPU benchmark. But when you can get the same work done in Joyent significantly faster for the comparable price, you’ll get far more mileage per instance, which is ultimately going to save the dollars." Or, "Wow, Amazon sure makes bank on this EC2 stuff,…

That, $0.2cents/second of course, is on the margin. The real challenge to doing this is, of course, not the hardware/hvac/colo costs, but the several millions (tens of millions?) of dollars associated with building the software infrastructure required to scale/deploy the CPU/Storage/Services dynamically. And then there is the well staffed devops/NOC environment required. And the single-minded dedication to building t…

Of course today you can get over 90% of the required software off the shelf, see cloudstack and openstack, both used in clusters of 1000s of production servers running 10,000s of VMs.

Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS

#23

Post by ryankask »

latchkey wrote: post #13

I recently tried out Joyent SmartOS for a NodeJS consulting gig I'm doing. After about 30 seconds, I killed the vm and switched to Ubuntu 12 server. I don't care if SmartOS is 'faster' or has dtrace. The fact that it is missing basic things like top (no prstat isn't anything close to top) and 'standard' things like upstart made me want to run for the hills. The Joyent wiki documentation on SmartOS is abysmal at best.…

We used SmartOS (or its predecessor) for 3+ years. The experience was overall very positive and performance was great. Joyent's reliability is outstanding. Sure, some of our software was dated but everything worked.

The bigger issue is Joyent's product lifespans. We've had to migrate our servers twice in that three or so years. Because of that, I moved to a different cloud provider. I don't know if I can expect better.

The only outage I can recall was recently when they began the process of EOLing the current product we use from them.

Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS

#24

Post by latchkey »

bcantrill wrote: post #21
latchkey wrote: post #13

I recently tried out Joyent SmartOS for a NodeJS consulting gig I'm doing. After about 30 seconds, I killed the vm and switched to Ubuntu 12 server. I don't care if SmartOS is 'faster' or has dtrace. The fact that it is missing basic things like top (no prstat isn't anything close to top) and 'standard' things like upstart made me want to run for the hills. The Joyent wiki documentation on SmartOS is abysmal at best.…

For whatever it's worth, we are very actively working to make SmartOS a more hospitable environment to those coming from other systems. I'm not sure if you're interested in the details here (after all, it sounds like you might have spent longer on the HN comment than on the "30 seconds" with SmartOS), but if you provision the default base smartos64 image (currently version 1.6.3), "top" is available via pkgsrc ("pkgi…

As a new customer, I feel like Joyent needs to focus on simplifying things quite a bit. I want to run NodeJS on a server. I install the aptly titled 'SmartMachine Node.js' product and expect it to be the right version and the basic tools installed to get the job done. Instead, I get this morass of oh, you didn't install the right machine or oh, node is in some other directory now. Can you see how that might be distracting?

Sure, I didn't spend a lot of time with it, why should I? I saw that it was missing a great deal of basic things out of the box. I decided quickly to not waste my time learning more esoteric stuff that is only useful if I stick with Joyent and SmartOS.

You are an absolute genius for creating dtrace and it is nice to have but certainly isn't a necessity for most applications. Your example is voxer which is a total edge case since they've been pushing the node envelope since day one.

In the end, the reality is that SmartOS doesn't feel modern at all, it feels like Windows98. Actually, it feels like SunOS back when I had pizza boxes under my desk 15 years ago. I could spend time giving you tons of (free) feedback about what's wrong with SmartOS or I could just use Ubuntu and move on.

9900+ concurrent connections on a $22/mo Ubuntu box is 'good enough' for me.

Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS

#25

Post by kristianp »

I tried out Joyent back when they did a year's free VM promotion with Facebook. I found Solaris to be very nice, but it required a little work to get software built for linux to build on it. Different C compiler for one thing. Usually for common pieces of software, like ruby there is a guide on the Joyent website for compiling.

Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS

#26

Post by facorreia »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #10

For Windows servers, Joyent is prohibitively more expensive than EC2... though their Linux prices trounce AWS' significantly. I wonder why that is. They also don't offer anything smaller than "medium". Does anyone know a good cloud-based Windows host as an alternative to AWS?

I presume you've tried Windows Azure?

Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS

#27

Post by zimbatm »

twotwotwo wrote: post #18
twotwotwo wrote: post #2

- No one pick a host based on a single microbenchmark, please. Game out what your app would need to achieve your target performance level with what each host offers. Amazon still might lose (sounds like that happened with TripAdvisor) but at least you've made your decision a sane way. - For the best price, you'd want to use a reserved instance if this is a webserver, and perhaps a spot instance if it's a batch/HPC ta…

Did the math on how to get cheaper ECU-hours from Amazon. Prices below are per ECU-hour, not per instance-hour; '1yr' is the one-year reserved instance price with the upfront cost amortized; 'spot' is the spot price in the US West (Oregon) region when I looked just now. Small: 6.5 cents/ecu-hr Small, 1yr: 4.7 cents/ecu-hr Small, spot: 1 cent/ecu-hr High-CPU: 3.3 cents/ecu-hr High-CPU, 1yr: 1.9 cents/ecu-hr High-CPU,…

cc2.8xlarge is the best in terms of price/ECU-hours. You get a whopping 60GB of RAM, 10Gbps network interface. Downsides are: EBS only, us-east-1 only.

cc2.8xlarge: 0.15 cents/ecu-hr

cc2.8xlarge 1yr: 0.058 cents/ecu-hr

Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS

#29

Post by rplnt »

facorreia wrote: post #26
ComputerGuru wrote: post #10

For Windows servers, Joyent is prohibitively more expensive than EC2... though their Linux prices trounce AWS' significantly. I wonder why that is. They also don't offer anything smaller than "medium". Does anyone know a good cloud-based Windows host as an alternative to AWS?

I presume you've tried Windows Azure?

Isn't azure more of a PaaS than a IaaS?

Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS

#30

Post by 4ad »

If you think this benchmark is impressive... just do some I/O benchmarking. It blows EC2 away much harder than it does for CPU. ZFS on local disks with SSDs for L2ARC, and no virtualization overhead (this obviously applies to SmartOS). Oh, and the performance is predictable and doesn't vary in time. And you have DTrace to understand your application.
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