How is it that Amazon.com is so reliable if there are so many problems with their "cloud" products? Do they not use the same software to run their site?
"Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"
41–50 of 157 posts
Re: "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cloud significantly lowers capital expenditure to get into an Internet-enabled business, which cultivates the very startup ecology that Y Combinator exists to leverage and support. Those teenagers who started the Facebook Pokemon game would have never had the resources to build a scalable solution with hardware that they own. (That is, unless Y Combinator paid a lot more money as part of participating. They might…
If you start with the cloud, you best formulate an "exit plan". Reddit for example doesn't seem to have one and seems quite stuck.
Reddit didn't start with the cloud, though. Very early, they were on dedicated and found it inflexible to their needs, and scaling a site with the eyeballs that Reddit has would have been very difficult with their first architecture.
The "exit plan" is, really, not marrying your entire architecture to one provider. Spreading the love gives you a bargaining chip and flexibility to see which provider will perform better for you in the long run, and allows you to see the strengths and weaknesses of each. Internet latency is pretty bad, though, so sharding an app across multiple providers can be a bit of a challenge.
Re: "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"
#43Having been at a startup that used hundreds of EC2 instances and EBS volumes I can assure you all that Amazon EBS performance is downright terrible and Amazon didn't inspire any confidence that they could solve it.
Even worse than the EBS performance is Amazon does not offer any shared storage solutions between EC2 instances. You have to cobble together your own shared storage using NFS and EBS volumes making it sucky to the Nth power.
EC2 is fine for Hadoop-style distributed work loads, and distributed data stores that can tolerate eventual consistency, that's all good. But for production database applications requiring constant and reliable performance, forget it.
Re: "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"
#44How is it that Amazon.com is so reliable if there are so many problems with their "cloud" products? Do they not use the same software to run their site?
I suspect it's because amazon.com has different performance requirements. For instance, I imagine the read/write balance is very different for amazon.com than for reddit.com.
Re: "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"
#45How is it that Amazon.com is so reliable if there are so many problems with their "cloud" products? Do they not use the same software to run their site?
If you understand the limitations of the various products you can build a VERY reliable service. The reddit assumption of a single datacenter and single technology to store that data was an engineering failure. They essentially didn't have a disaster recovery plan in place.
Re: "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"
#46We were bitten by EBS' slowness at my company recently, when moving an existing project to AWS. You effectively can't get decent performance off of a single EBS volume with PostgreSQL; you need to set up 10 or so of them and make a software RAID to remove the bottleneck. It's a fairly large time commitment to build and maintain, but it's pretty fast and reliable once it's up and running (cases like the recent downtim…
Did you use Raid10? I would love to see a post on using postgresql with ec2/ebs -- how to setup raid, etc.
Re: "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"
#47The AWS business model is to sell shared hosting on commodity hardware. Cloud is a cool buzzword but it is still sharing hardware. Cheap, commodity hardware is the magic that lets you scale up so big and so fast for a highly accessible price. But you're still sharing the same hardware as everyone else and its still just commodity hardware.
Sharing hardware is an implementation detail. You could potentially build a cloud infrastructure where everyone has dedicated hardware. The whole point of cloud computing is that the implementation shouldn't matter to end uses.
Re: "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"
#48We were bitten by EBS' slowness at my company recently, when moving an existing project to AWS. You effectively can't get decent performance off of a single EBS volume with PostgreSQL; you need to set up 10 or so of them and make a software RAID to remove the bottleneck. It's a fairly large time commitment to build and maintain, but it's pretty fast and reliable once it's up and running (cases like the recent downtim…
Did you use Raid10? I would love to see a post on using postgresql with ec2/ebs -- how to setup raid, etc.
I second that.
Re: "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"
#49We used Amazon and got bad performance in the beginning too. It is bad when you pull files out of S3. By bad I mean the latency is high.
We tried GoGrid and they lost or crashed our server instance.
I've personally used Rackspace, so far so good, but I've only been doing development on it.
Re: "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"
#50I recently had an EBS volume lose data for no apparent reason. I'm not a heavy EC2 user at all - I was just doing some memory/cpu-heavy stuff that wouldn't fit in to RAM on my laptop and using EBS as a temporary store so I could transfer data using a cheap micro instance and only spin up the big expensive instances when everything was in place. I ended up downloading files on an m2.4xlarge because the files I had jus…
Are you certain the data left the filesystem buffer and actually got acknowledged by EBS?