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Why we moved away from AWS

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Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#51

Post by Spooky23 »

notacoward wrote: post #8

AWS is just not very cost-effective in terms of performance per dollar, especially when it comes to storage performance (my own specialty). It only appears that they are because of the hourly billing and a human inability to compare quantities across nearly three orders of magnitude (hours vs. months) intuitively. Now that there are hundreds of vendors with hourly billing, as there have been for a while, it's easy to…

I just completed a project at an organization-owned datacenter where we wasted 4 months on needless BS to deploy about 12 servers.

My team's time is easily worth $500-600/hr, so we easily wasted $300k. So the fact that my internal datacenter provider can give me a VM that costs 20% of what EC2 charges or disk that is more performant at a similar cost is interesting trivia, but isn't saving money.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#52

Post by canterburry »

dergachev wrote: post #12

OVH actually supports running the Proxmox virtualization distro on their servers. That means you can easily get a 32GB dedicated server with raid1 SSDs (around $100/month here in Canada) and spin up VMs to your heart's content. Proxmox also supports running your host nodes in a cluster, which allows for live migration. And if the math isn't already ridiculous, keep in mind that all the running OpenVZ containers (whic…

While that certainly seems like a good idea on the surface, it creates a horrible single point of failure for your entire setup. I certainly hope you get more hosts than one and distribute all your VMs across them. You'll have zero failover in case of host failure.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#53

Post by frakkingcylons »

sxcurry wrote: post #46
macspoofing wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dedicated host would most certainly be a better (and cheaper) option for you, but hey, if you don't have time to look around, I suppose it's a reasonable trade-off. >I need a server that has good uptime and good performance. Then a single EC2 instance is not a good option for you. Terrible up-time, and terrible performance.

Can you supply more details - maybe I am missing something. My EC2 instance has been up for 249 days now and my node.js webserver instance seems very responsive. I still think it's a reasonable trade-off in terms of cost. My time is expensive, and to be honest even a few hundred dollars a month extra in server cost is not important. This is a research project, not a commercial website, so my needs may be different th…

I may not be hitting the points that macspoofing was trying to make, but at least in my experience, you can get much better value with a different host (like DigitalOcean or Linode) where the setup time is minimal and the performance benefits are substantial. However, if your priority isn't perfomance/dollar, then the trade-offs are subtle and insubstantial and EC2 is fine.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#54

Post by mechanical_fish »

The $750/month savings cited here is not real†, but for the sake of argument let's pretend it is.

Is $750/month a significant amount of money for the company? In the USA, this is perhaps the cost of one engineer-day, and one could raise a year's worth of this money by successfully applying for a single additional credit card. (Not that I recommend bootstrapping with credit cards. But it has been done.)

Of course, it may be the case that a company could improve customer satisfaction, and therefore revenue, by double-digits by improving performance on optimized hardware. But if this is the case, where is the discussion of that? Where is the data: A/B testing, customer satisfaction, churn rate, monthly revenue? They should be front and center.

† Without getting into the reduced redundancy, the additional complexity of hosting multiple unrelated services on each instance, the "additional maintenance" referred to in the post, the lack of server capacity to cover emergencies and staging and load testing and continuous integration, and the risk involved in switching infrastructure out from under a working business-critical application... any estimate which doesn't include the cost of engineering time is wrong. All changes have engineering costs. Just talking about this idea is costing engineering time.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#55

Post by jpalioto »

>> ... or move it to your own server as we did.

I'm curious ... have you factored in your power costs? People costs (or opportunity costs if your existing staff is re-allocated to server admin tasks)? Additional cost of space for your on-prem setup? Have you factored in the cost of potential downtime? Single points of failure?

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#57

Post by lobster_johnson »

Spooky23 wrote: post #51
notacoward wrote: post #8

AWS is just not very cost-effective in terms of performance per dollar, especially when it comes to storage performance (my own specialty). It only appears that they are because of the hourly billing and a human inability to compare quantities across nearly three orders of magnitude (hours vs. months) intuitively. Now that there are hundreds of vendors with hourly billing, as there have been for a while, it's easy to…

I just completed a project at an organization-owned datacenter where we wasted 4 months on needless BS to deploy about 12 servers. My team's time is easily worth $500-600/hr, so we easily wasted $300k. So the fact that my internal datacenter provider can give me a VM that costs 20% of what EC2 charges or disk that is more performant at a similar cost is interesting trivia, but isn't saving money.

Does your anecdote translate to other organizations, though?

In my own case, my company ditched AWS in favour of getting our own rack with about 10 custom servers. We have a full-time sysadmin, so nobody's time was wasted on the transition; whatever stuff the developers (who are also $500-600/hr people) were needed for during that time was valuable, because it forced us to rewrite the deployment system, which would have been required at some point anyway.

What was the "needless BS" you had to do?

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#60

Post by troels »

nemesisj wrote: post #40
leokun wrote: post #13

If you move to Rackspace, stay away from DWS, the dallas datacenter. It's over-booked, the network has constant issues, vm's on the same host machine as you are able to cause your vm network issues, the list of problems never stops. We recently switched to Azure from Rackspace, but we're still evaluating if it will work for us long term. Azure's issues are that you have to request number of core increases, and you ca…

I'd stay away from Rackspace London as well. Horrible horrible experience. 1. Noisy neighbours impact you all the time 2. The staff are really poorly trained and don't know how to troubleshoot. 3. They're expensive. 4. Their control panels are really bad, constantly being updated and migrated, and are just a complete mess. 5. They've had several major network outages that have lasted for quite a long time (hours) tha…

For balance, my previous venture hosted (still does) on RS London and we had good experience with them. The few times where we needed support, they were excellent.
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