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Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

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Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#21

Post by qeorge »

I've been able to make good utilization of Linode's multiple cores for our Sphinx server (http://sphinxsearch.com/)

In sphinx's config files, its super easy to split an index up into 4 parts, and then assign each partial index to one core.

Doing this, we find that all 4 cores are utilized nicely (>50%) almost all of the time. I feel like we're getting a really good value out of that machine.

AirBnB has a good writeup on this config: http://nerds.airbnb.com/how-we-improved-search-performance-b...

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#22

Post by pjungwir »

mgkimsal wrote: post #5

Yes, amazon is 'overpriced' if what you're looking at is CPU or disk speed (which is not a bad metric, really). Where amazon shines is the amount of programmatic interaction you can do with it - have build scripts kick off an EC2 instance to run tests, send reports, shut it down. Programmatically bring up more instances during peak times, spin them down at night, etc. AFAICT, Linode doesn't offer that, and they proba…

The other thing Amazon offers is investor confidence. I've worked with several clients who could save tons of money every month by going to Linode, DO, etc., but stay with Amazon (or Heroku) because they feel it reassures investors they are following "best practices." I can understand lots of reasons not to switch, e.g. just having higher priorities, but this reason seems particularly silly.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#23

Post by stevedomin »

I found your conclusion a bit misleading and unfortunately a lot of people often comes to the same conclusion.

Indeed the CPU is limiting factor in your bench, and while you say you're comparing apples to apples, it's not true in my opinion.

Maybe I'm wrong but I never see these actors as really competing in the same market : of course if you're looking for the best CPU perfomance/price ratio AWS is one the worst choice. But that's not what you're paying for imo, as someone already mention you're paying for the programmatic access, the ecosystem, the auto-scaling ability, monitoring, etc. Move to AWS if you need the "Elastic" part in EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) or if you know what you're doing and what you're paying for.

Same for DO, what you're paying for is the SSD, they're advertising about it everywhere, so it's kind of obvious that a big part of what you'll pay for is the SSD.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#24

Post by throwit1979 »

trebor wrote: post #10
throwit1979 wrote: post #4

...and the author is using Laravel, which delivers stunningly terrible latency and throughput performance in the techempower benchmarks: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ Would be nice to see similar benchmarks using a framework that doesn't resemble a honeypot's tarpit.

Hi. Laravel user/contributor here. I suggest you try the framework before judging it based on a benchmark . Not sure about their system/code, but a large production application with APC (Laravel 3.2.14, just like the benchmark) has a latency of 90-120ms, and some of those pages are pretty complex.

Techempower invites SMEs and advocates of their language/platform to submit pull requests to improve any overlooked performance problems in the specific benchmarks.

You're more than welcome to help make laravel look better in these benchmarks. But unless you're running the PHP through HipHop, I doubt you're going to get anywhere near the statically-compiled platforms near the top.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#25

Post by samcrawford »

It would be helpful if the author included the round-trip latency (even some simple pings) alongside the benchmark so we could judge how far the servers are from the client.

This will have a significant impact on the ab numbers (particularly as he's not using the -k option and therefore establishing a new TCP session for every request).

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#26

Post by Ixiaus »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #20
mark_l_watson wrote: post #19

Well, AWS does have some very useful value add services: Elastic MapReduce, S3, and DynamoDB being my favorites. Way back when, Amazon gave me about $1200 of free use credits over a two year period, and I played, experimented, used it for most customer projects, etc. I also used AWS for almost all of my own projects. In the last year or two however, I have started going back to renting large VPS by the month (I use R…

BTW, I wrote up how I use git commit/push hooks for deploying http://blog.markwatson.com/2013/06/automating-clojure-web-ap...

Using a VCS as your deployment strategy is The Wrong Way to do it.

I won't go into it in this comment because it's been beaten to death and you can find information about deployments everywhere; even the commenter on your blog post makes a better suggestion than your VCS deployment strategy.

Continuous integration, source/binary distributions, automated provisioning, sandboxing, versioning, etc...; it's all out there.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#27

Post by PaulHoule »

The 'small' instance he's testing is the worst deal Amazon offers. If you buy certain instances you get can a better connection to EBS, and then you can allegedly buy better I/O for $. A fair analysis is going to involve pages and pages of graphs and charts...

It is hard to beat AMZN's flexibility and easy provisioning. For instance, even my sister-in-law can walk up to AWS, spin up an instance with Windows, log in with RDP and then enjoy everything you can enjoy on Windows other than high-end gaming. (For you mac-ers in the audience, this is a clean and economical way to make sure that your landing page works for "the rest of us")

But you don't have to choose because you can work with Linux. On top of that, AMZN layers services such as Elastic Map-Reduce which are compatible with industry standards but eliminate so much time you could waste sysadmining.

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#29

Post by iriche »

qeorge wrote: post #21

I've been able to make good utilization of Linode's multiple cores for our Sphinx server ( http://sphinxsearch.com/ ) In sphinx's config files, its super easy to split an index up into 4 parts, and then assign each partial index to one core. Doing this, we find that all 4 cores are utilized nicely (>50%) almost all of the time. I feel like we're getting a really good value out of that machine. AirBnB has a good write…

Now you can increase that to 6 parts since Linode increased to 6 cores :)

Re: Cloud server showdown: Amazon AWS EC2 vs. Linode vs. DigitalOcean

#30

Post by akurilin »

Those of you who made the switch from EC2 to any of the other providers, what are you missing the most? I'm right now pretty integrated into the whole VPC/Route53/IAM/S3/SES web and get the feeling that it'd be pretty rough to untangle myself from that.
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