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EC2 Maintenance Update II

aws.amazon.com

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Re: EC2 Maintenance Update II

#51

Post by snacksmasters »

samstave wrote: post #46
jeffbarr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am always happy to help, time and circumstances allowing. Before joining Amazon I earned my living by consulting for startups. I could always tell when they were about to run out of money when they would offer to pay me in servers. This was always the cue to find my next gig.

I would like to request, that if you're going to suggest: "Run instances in two or more Availability Zones." as a fault-tolerant architecture method (which everyone SHOULD do) - can we please have a flag or tag to say that "Traffic between Zone-1-HOST-A and Zone-2-HOST-A" is specifically resiliancy/HA/fault-tolerant connection traffic could benefit from a discount in zone transfer fees? We are moving many hundreds se…

As long as you are using the private IP or public DNS name outbound traffic between EC2 instances in different AZ's in the same region is $.01/GB, inbound is free.

Pricing is different for traffic going outside the EC2 network.

Re: EC2 Maintenance Update II

#52

Post by jeffbarr »

samstave wrote: post #46
jeffbarr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am always happy to help, time and circumstances allowing. Before joining Amazon I earned my living by consulting for startups. I could always tell when they were about to run out of money when they would offer to pay me in servers. This was always the cue to find my next gig.

I would like to request, that if you're going to suggest: "Run instances in two or more Availability Zones." as a fault-tolerant architecture method (which everyone SHOULD do) - can we please have a flag or tag to say that "Traffic between Zone-1-HOST-A and Zone-2-HOST-A" is specifically resiliancy/HA/fault-tolerant connection traffic could benefit from a discount in zone transfer fees? We are moving many hundreds se…

There already is a tiered pricing model for this.

Data that goes between AZ's is charged at $0.01 / GB.

Data that flows from an EC2 instance to the Internet is charged at $0.12 / GB (for up to 10 TB / month, with discounts from there, and there's also 1 GB / month of free traffic).

Details are on http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

Re: EC2 Maintenance Update II

#53

Post by cthalupa »

snowwrestler wrote: post #48
toomuchtodo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their philosophy, as is pervasive in the hosting industry, is that they have paying customers so whatever they are doing must be right. Obviously Amazon often also seems to act this way, but this particular maintenance was handled well afaict, and availability zones showed their value. This could explain why Rackspace was shopped around by Morgan Stanley. They may be profitable now, but Amazon and Google are going…

Amazon and Google are worthless to any company without a robust sysadmin/devops team, which is most companies in the world. It's easy to get stuck in the tech-savvy bubble here, where most people can write code, pick up Chef in a week, and are trying to build cheaply at "web scale." Those people don't need, or want to pay for, support with their servers. But most companies need some help to run a few servers for web…

> Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board.

SoftLayer has provided manged service for years, and was bigger than Rackspace even before they were purchased by IBM.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-... (Ignore the 2009 - the post has been updated as of 2013)

Re: EC2 Maintenance Update II

#54

Post by snowwrestler »

cthalupa wrote: post #53
snowwrestler wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon and Google are worthless to any company without a robust sysadmin/devops team, which is most companies in the world. It's easy to get stuck in the tech-savvy bubble here, where most people can write code, pick up Chef in a week, and are trying to build cheaply at "web scale." Those people don't need, or want to pay for, support with their servers. But most companies need some help to run a few servers for web…

> Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board. SoftLayer has provided manged service for years, and was bigger than Rackspace even before they were purchased by IBM. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-... (Ignore the 2009 - the post has been updated as of 2013)

Plenty of hosting companies offer managed hosting as an upsell. You can't even get pricing for it at Softlayer without talking to a sales rep, for example.

Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board, because even their smallest cloud servers come with phone support. As far as I know, you cannot get phone support with an arbitrary set of cloud servers at Softlayer, or Amazon, or Google.

Re: EC2 Maintenance Update II

#55

Post by snacksmasters »

snowwrestler wrote: post #54
cthalupa wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board. SoftLayer has provided manged service for years, and was bigger than Rackspace even before they were purchased by IBM. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-... (Ignore the 2009 - the post has been updated as of 2013)

Plenty of hosting companies offer managed hosting as an upsell. You can't even get pricing for it at Softlayer without talking to a sales rep, for example. Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board, because even their smallest cloud servers come with phone support. As far as I know, you cannot get phone support with an arbitrary set of cloud servers at Softlayer, or Amazon, or Go…

Would you rather be forced to fly first-class or have the option to choose?

Re: EC2 Maintenance Update II

#56

Post by samstave »

jeffbarr wrote: post #52
samstave wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to request, that if you're going to suggest: "Run instances in two or more Availability Zones." as a fault-tolerant architecture method (which everyone SHOULD do) - can we please have a flag or tag to say that "Traffic between Zone-1-HOST-A and Zone-2-HOST-A" is specifically resiliancy/HA/fault-tolerant connection traffic could benefit from a discount in zone transfer fees? We are moving many hundreds se…

There already is a tiered pricing model for this. Data that goes between AZ's is charged at $0.01 / GB. Data that flows from an EC2 instance to the Internet is charged at $0.12 / GB (for up to 10 TB / month, with discounts from there, and there's also 1 GB / month of free traffic). Details are on http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

I know there is a tiered pricing, but I spend 5X on zone-to-zone data transfer over what data needs to leave AWS to my userbase. So, even with the tiered model, I still pay a lot just to get data around my app becuase I constantly have to swap boxes between zones.

Re: EC2 Maintenance Update II

#57

Post by mentat »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #49
wmf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

something like availability zones How is that different from a datacenter?

AZs in AWS are essentially distinct "datacenters" from a logical perspective. There is no shared infrastructure between them; if AZ B drops off, as long as you have your data and instances replicated and serving in another AZ, you will see no downtime.

That is "in theory". In fact there have been region wide failures at the AWS services level, though none recently that I know of.

Re: EC2 Maintenance Update II

#58

Post by snowwrestler »

snacksmasters wrote: post #55
snowwrestler wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of hosting companies offer managed hosting as an upsell. You can't even get pricing for it at Softlayer without talking to a sales rep, for example. Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board, because even their smallest cloud servers come with phone support. As far as I know, you cannot get phone support with an arbitrary set of cloud servers at Softlayer, or Amazon, or Go…

Would you rather be forced to fly first-class or have the option to choose?

No one is forcing anyone to buy from Rackspace. The question is whether Rackspace has a unique value proposition against Google or Amazon, and the answer is support.

Re: EC2 Maintenance Update II

#60

Post by toomuchtodo »

amaks wrote: post #59
toomuchtodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've built your environment properly, you don't require live migration.

That's not true. Hardware where VMs are hosted requires repairs from time to time, so VMs do require migration.

Stop instance, start instance, land on new hardware (AWS EC2, with EBS storage). If your application requires a hot migration, you've failed, as it can't tolerate failures inherent to a virtualized environment.
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