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Why I Dislike EC2

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Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#41

Post by nasalgoat »

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…

The guys at Netflix don't mind paying the premium to avoid the "overhead" of systems people. It's more a philosophical issue than a technical one.

Also, they get preferred pricing and status at Amazon that normal people don't get.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#42

Post by latch »

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…

We do spend thousands a month of hosting. We have servers in 5 geographies...If you include our CDN costs, the amount we spend is quite large. The money we save is enough to get a full time devops and then some.

Netflix probably doesn't pay what you and I pay. Also, for every Netflix, you can find 100 examples that use dedicated or collocated.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#43

Post by mardix »

I've been using Singlehop.com for over three years, and I couldn't be any happier. I rented a dedicated server in which I can create and destroy as many VMs as I want. I didn't have to setup anything. Once I got the dynamic server everything was available for me. No sweat, no headache, same price every month.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#44

Post by krallin »

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.…

In the past, when an AZ goes down, everyone tries to transfer to another AZ and makes lots of API calls.

Consequently AWS has to rate-limit API requests to avoid taking another AZ down.

Maybe this has changed though, but we'll probably have to wait for another disaster to know!

---

But of course, an AZ shouldn't be your infrastructure's single point of failure!

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#45

Post by nasalgoat »

tzury wrote: post #29

1. AWS beats all others when it comes to security [1]. 2. EC2 is just one item in the package called AWS. Hence, if you just build something more than just "web-app with *db" at the back-end, say a full blown platform, then I know no other option for you to get the full stack integrated API for Data-warehouse, DNS, Load-balancing, auto-scaling, billing, etc. 3. Speed is sometimes over-rated. You should be be speedy w…

20ms could mean the difference between a single digit rank in the App Store and a three digit rank. I see it every day - if my systems drop by 50ms average, I see a drop in rank.

And 20ms? Try more like 300ms+ difference. Hell, sometimes a full second or more for some sites. Anyone who says total disaster recovery time is more important than total latency isn't running anything remotely to scale.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#46

Post by jd007 »

vidarh wrote: post #31
jd007 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue with the hybrid approach is devops cost. you will be basically dealing with two very different infrastructures, and building the ops for such a hybrid system could be costly (in money and time). Taking this into account, the money you save shrinks, In addition, a more complex system most likely has more parts to fail as well, so your total reliability might suffer somewhat as well. Another thing to tak…

My experience is that the devops cost drops: Most of the time you're dealing with a much simpler and more predictable dedicated environment - your challenges happen when you have to handle (rare) abnormal spikes. In terms of inter-datacenter network reliability: You have to deal with this if you want reliable hosting anyway. If you spread your database and app servers across data centers, yes, you are begging for pro…

If you are using a hybrid approach (assuming dedicated + EC2), you have to have the ops system in place to deal with the dedicated environment AND the EC2 environment, which is why devops cost will be higher. Of course if you only deal with dedicated hardware your devops cost could drop.

Inter-datacenter network issues are less of a problem when your datacenters are from the same provider, because they are responsible for making sure the connection is good. Plus, when problems do occur, you can troubleshoot fairly easily (when I had the routing problem with dedicated provider + EC2, I had to bounce back and forth with the network support for both a few times before one of them admitted the routing issue with the upstream network provider) as you are dealing with a single company.

I understand the hybrid solutions that other providers such as softlayer offers, but I was mostly addressing the suggestion of using dedicated + EC2 in the original article.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#47

Post by tszming »

>> At our most expensive location, we get 64GB ECC RAM, 4x1TB RAID 10 (hardware), Dual E5-2620 and 4 1Gbps adapters (bonded, 2x public, 2x private) for around 60% the price of an M3-2XLarge.

M3-2XLarge = $720 per month, 60% = $432

As a softlayer customer, I would be very surprised if you can get 2620/64GB/4TB disks at this price range, we also consider ourself not a small customer, but for the above config, I guess we need to pay $800+. (after discount)

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#48

Post by adventured »

While clearly Amazon is working on bringing down the cost of EC2, as it is today you're paying a premium to get at the AWS ecosystem (and for some companies it's well worth it). There's no other great reason to choose EC2 for servers given the pricing. I understand why people keep writing about the cost, but if you have use for the myriad of AWS services, then good luck replicating what they offer on dedicated servers (without spending an equally huge sum, either in dollars or time or both).

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#49

Post by trotsky »

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…

I can't quite parse what you're saying about the reward to risk level being too low for lock in, but having worked with a number of startups that were 100% aws and paying dearly for it thge lock in was their major problem - ec2 ancillary private branded or unique services all seem to be designed with lock in being the number one goal. From what I've seen the first acknowledgment of lock in seems to open the flood gate, kind of a well if we're already "stuck" we might as well use this proprietary feature that will save us 10% in build time. Not the smartest approach, but no one accuses most web startups of being in the long game.

Re: Why I Dislike EC2

#50

Post by dantiberian »

tzury wrote: post #29

1. AWS beats all others when it comes to security [1]. 2. EC2 is just one item in the package called AWS. Hence, if you just build something more than just "web-app with *db" at the back-end, say a full blown platform, then I know no other option for you to get the full stack integrated API for Data-warehouse, DNS, Load-balancing, auto-scaling, billing, etc. 3. Speed is sometimes over-rated. You should be be speedy w…

> 3. Speed is sometimes over-rated. You should be be speedy where it matters more. That is, how fast can you redeploy your entire cloud from scratch in case of a disaster should be more interesting to you than if a webpage takes 20 more ms to get to the browser. In our case, at AWS, it is a matter of Personally, I'd rather have 20ms shaved off my users time than a 20 minute disaster recovery time. Disasters happen perhaps once a year (on AWS, possibly less on dedicated servers), people are loading pages every day.
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