- 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…
> sounds like that happened with TripAdvisor is this a reference to another post or story? I Googled and couldn't find it
Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
51–58 of 58 posts
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Ah, it is indeed cheaper, but I'm getting different specific numbers: 240 cents/88 ecu-hr == 2.7 cents/ecu-hr on demand; less if reserved or spot. cc2.8xl is also in the Oregon and Ireland regions, but not others as far as I can tell.
1) Funny that scaling up to one of their largest instance types can improve bang-for-buck, on this metric at least. 2) I wish Amazon made it simpler to sort all this out.
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#53For 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?
Azure IaaS is even more expensive on a small scale (though it does get cheaper as you scale up). Azure PaaS would fit the bill very nicely, but someone at MS completely dropped the ball: you have no option of using SSL + your own domain!
You can have either your own domain name or SSL w/ their subdomain.
Who the bleep would settle for that? What kind of "enterprise solution" is this?
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you serve the US market Joyent is maybe good, if you serve the EU market you have way better deals with EU providers. Joyent have some servers in EU but they are just collocating. EC2 is available worldwide for good latency. Joyent love micro benchmarks because they allow one customer to grab a lot of CPU in burst, but if you are one of the other customers on the same hardware node, it is better to have a bit slow…
Loic, any pointers you can give (here or off-list) for the EU providers with way better deals? Thanks!
Bare metal, the best is OVH. You get a server in 1h in France or in Canada. You can also get instances for pretty cheap but I have only used them as throw away test instances. Oh, they have free bandwidth between all their datacenters, even between Canada and France as they managed their own transatlantic links.
They have a very decent "private cloud" offer. The feedback is good but I am a bare metal + Ganeti[1] to manage my VMs kind of person.
If you like pure instances, I have also instance running on Gandi[2] infrastructure. My blog made several times the front page of HN and without special caching it handled extremely well the load (in fact, you could barely see the increase in CPU usage in the monitoring graph while seeing a huge increase of the outbound bandwidth).
Another good provider is Hetzner[3]. You need to pay attention to the server you select (ECC memory or not) but then they are reliable (I had a server with them for 4 years or so without a single issue).
In Europe, AWS is in Irland, I suppose it was for tax purpose that they selected this location, but from a latency point of view, this is stupid if you want to deliver packets in the South or East of Europe (and even part of Scandinavia because most of the time your route does IE, NL or FR, and then goes North).
Sorry for the long post... but at the end of the day, do your calculations. AWS is great if like Netflix you scale from 20% to 100% during the day[4] (the hit on the cache gives you how they scale) but if you are a normal shop without day/night activity because you are at global level or so well optimized that you just not need to scale (a single dedicated server with SSD is incredibly powerful nowadays) you simply do not need "the cloud". Just test with 1k€, do a bit of maths, then select the best choice.
[1]: http://notes.ceondo.com/ganeti/ [2]: http://www.gandi.net/ [3]: http://www.hetzner.de/ [4]: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/01/ephemeral-volatile-cachi...
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I presume you've tried Windows Azure?
Azure IaaS is even more expensive on a small scale (though it does get cheaper as you scale up). Azure PaaS would fit the bill very nicely, but someone at MS completely dropped the ball: you have no option of using SSL + your own domain! You can have either your own domain name or SSL w/ their subdomain. Who the bleep would settle for that? What kind of "enterprise solution" is this?
You probably mean the Azure Websites service. It doesn't support SSL on custom domains yet, but it's a preview version. That feature is expected before this service is released.
The PaaS offer per se is called Hosted Services and it does support SSL on custom domains.[1]
The price for the IaaS offer for a small Windows VM is $0.08/h ($57.60/month).[2] EC2 pricing for a small Windows VM is $0.115/h ($82.80/month).[3]
[1] https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/...
[2] https://www.windowsazure.com/pt-br/pricing/calculator/?scena...
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#56I haven't tried out Joyent, but I've tested out Linode and Storm-on-Demand and they easily beat Amazon EC2. My benchmark was running our production image processing algorithm that utilizes OpenCV via python on Ubuntu Server (definitely CPU-limited). FWIW, here are my benchmarks, along with pricing for Northern California regions: Linode 512: 15.2 seconds, 65 cents per day Storm-on-demand 1 GB: 13.05 seconds, 5 cents…
That's very interesting! I converted the prices to be in the same units and did some calculations for better comparison. Linode Cost per day: $0.65 Time per image: 15.2 Images per day: 5684.2105263158 Cost per image: $0.0001143519 Images per dollar : 8744.9392712551 Storm-on-demand Cost per day: $1.2 Time per image: 13.05 Images per day: 6620.6896551724 Cost per image: $0.00018125 Images per dollar : 5517.2413793104…
that's a lot of significant digits :)
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Loic, any pointers you can give (here or off-list) for the EU providers with way better deals? Thanks!
Bare metal, the best is OVH. You get a server in 1h in France or in Canada. You can also get instances for pretty cheap but I have only used them as throw away test instances. Oh, they have free bandwidth between all their datacenters, even between Canada and France as they managed their own transatlantic links. They have a very decent "private cloud" offer. The feedback is good but I am a bare metal + Ganeti[1] to m…
We also like & use most of those providers with our own food (http://comodit.com) to deploy/manage them, even if they are bare metal. We also mix them in hybrid cloud scenarios.
If curious you may have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBHSz3fOP-4&hd=1 where we mix an eucalyptus private cloud on physical server with AWS.
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Ah, it is indeed cheaper, but I'm getting different specific numbers: 240 cents/88 ecu-hr == 2.7 cents/ecu-hr on demand; less if reserved or spot. cc2.8xl is also in the Oregon and Ireland regions, but not others as far as I can tell. 1) Funny that scaling up to one of their largest instance types can improve bang-for-buck, on this metric at least. 2) I wish Amazon made it simpler to sort all this out.
Thanks for the check. I don't remember how I calculated that..
Another downside of cc2.8xl is that the spot market is crazy, with spikes at $6/h or more.