Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#561

Post by bhntr3 » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 10:05 AM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #509

bhntr3 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a hard technical problem to shut down gracefully. But it's an easy product problem. Just suspend the account. AWS must do this already for some cases. No one running a real business on AWS wants a hard ceiling instead of billing alerts and service by service throttling. Which Amazon has. So, this is just the nuclear option for people's pet projects. It's not a bad thing to have but I wouldn't expect it…

> No one running a real business on AWS wants a hard ceiling instead of billing alerts and service by service throttling. Which Amazon has. I know startups that I could bankrupt with a few lines of code and a ~$60 server somewhere long before they'd be able to react to a billing alert if it wasn't for AWS being reasonably good about forgiving unexpected costs. I'm not so sure no one running a "real business" would li…

I meant a business that makes significant revenue and has enough users that downtime or data loss would be unacceptable.

If you can't afford downtime you probably can afford to wait for the alert and choose your own mitigation strategy. A system that can't tolerate downtime probably has an on-call rotation and these triggers ought to be reasonably fast.

If you can't react or can't afford to react, you probably can afford some downtime / data loss.

So the system doesn't need to have granular user defined controls. Just two modes. That was my point.

I think I triggered people with the phrase "real business" and I apologize for that.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#562

Post by dx034 » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 10:06 AM UTC

STRML wrote: post #293

manacit wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As @STRML said, the difference is that Amazon is using network attached (EBS) storage as the primary instance storage, instead of local SSD. This provides a ton of benefit to Amazon, and some benefit for the user as well: CoW backend allows for nearly instant snapshots and clones, multi server/rack redundancy with EC, ability to scale up with provisioned IOPS easily, etc. The downside is that the access methods for b…

It doesn't appear that Lightsail actually allows hooking up data volumes. This is a surprising regression considering AWS basically invented it, and a major downside compared to DO. So network-attached storage for Lightsail is upside for AWS, but all downside for the customer.

And they're still the same price as the others (traffic more expensive). How comes that? Do they just have such a higher margin or are there zero economies of scale?

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#563

Post by paulsutter » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 10:09 AM UTC

jholman wrote: post #554

paulsutter wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I'm sure. When coal becomes cheaper as a fuel (efficiency being one path), if that opens up new applications or use by a broader set of customers, it's no surprise at all that total revenue could go up. As for your example, most sentences are neither true nor false. Nothing interesting has a probability of 0.000 or 1.000. "This sentence is false" is clever use of language, may be interesting to sophomore philosop…

Regarding your question about a paradox, what would qualify to you as "an actual paradox"? What is the definition against which you try a contender? Free free to look it up in a dictionary, but that probably won't help you generate a definition that makes "This statement is false" non-paradoxical. Note also that the etymology of paradox is "beyond strange", so historically the bar for qualifying is simply to be a ide…

> I'm curious what probability you think applies to propositions like "2 + 2 = 4" and "All triangles have 3 sides" and "All triangles have less than 11 sides".

Those are great examples, thanks. All true, and there's nothing interesting about them.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#564

Post by dx034 » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 10:11 AM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #555

I just ran speedtest.net on a $5/mo 512MB DigitalOcean droplet in the San Francisco (SFO1) datacenter. ~ speedtest-cli Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Testing from DigitalOcean (192.241.229.48)... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Selecting best server based on ping... Hosted by Monkey Brains (San Francisco, CA) [5.93 km]: 2.132 ms Testing download Download: 921.09 Mbit/s Testing upload Upload: 705.31…

The problem with speedtest-cli is that the servers are set up to test domestic accounts, not other servers. You can be lucky and get ~1GBs bandwidth, but just because you don't doesn't mean that it's the fault of the provider. The server specs and speedtest only require a 1Gbit/s port, so you will probably not get higher results than yours anyway.

Network speed should generally not be the issue with AWS, it's disk iops where the non-local SSDs will make a major impact.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#565

Post by dx034 » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 10:14 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #383

meritt wrote: post #121

Is there anything preventing me from using these servers as proxies with incredibly cheap bandwidth? I assume it stacks? When we reach transfer limits I can just spin up an additional $5 instance to add another 1TB? $5/mo per 1TB of bandwidth = $5.00 / 1024 = $0.0049/GB compared to EC2's normal $0.09/GB -- That's a 91-95% discount on egress data!

Sort of. Lightsail service limits: "You can currently create up to 20 Lightsail instances, 5 static IPs, and 3 DNS domain zones in a Lightsail account." So obviously there's a hard cap within one account. The $80 account comes with 5tb, so one would have to be burning a bit of bandwidth - 100tb - to cap it out. Frankly though, at $1600, Amazon is still printing a massive profit margin on that 100tb of transfer. These…

Transfer is how they really make money. If you use a lot of services (especially spot pricing) and only pay 10% of bandwidth charges it will likely hurt them, so not sure if they'll allow it if many people start doing that.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#566

Post by nodesocket » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 10:19 AM UTC

dx034 wrote: post #564

nodesocket wrote: post #555

I just ran speedtest.net on a $5/mo 512MB DigitalOcean droplet in the San Francisco (SFO1) datacenter. ~ speedtest-cli Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Testing from DigitalOcean (192.241.229.48)... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Selecting best server based on ping... Hosted by Monkey Brains (San Francisco, CA) [5.93 km]: 2.132 ms Testing download Download: 921.09 Mbit/s Testing upload Upload: 705.31…

The problem with speedtest-cli is that the servers are set up to test domestic accounts, not other servers. You can be lucky and get ~1GBs bandwidth, but just because you don't doesn't mean that it's the fault of the provider. The server specs and speedtest only require a 1Gbit/s port, so you will probably not get higher results than yours anyway. Network speed should generally not be the issue with AWS, it's disk io…

Agree speedtest-cli is not perfect, but you can see from my test I got near the 1Gbps that DigitalOcean advertises. I am curious if AWS LightSail even breaks 100Mbps.

In terms of network speed not being important, that's not true. Lots of workloads are network bound not i/o bound (load balancers, web servers, etc).

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#567

Post by dx034 » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 10:20 AM UTC

loader wrote: post #258

msh wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how they can live on those prices. I have their 3 euro arm server and have no problem pushing more than a 100 megabit a second from it.

It's two fold. Amazon bandwidth is, I assume, premium tier 1. Where as ovh and scaleway are probably lower tier. Lower tier bandwidth is dirt cheap, like below $0.25 per mbps. Edit: 3 things, it's also shared among a lot of users that don't use what they can. For everyone using 100mbps there's probably 20 who use less then 1mbps.

OVH has a pretty solid network and are very transparent about peering and utilization.[1] The network is definitely much smaller than Amazon, but never had any problems with their peering, the network seems to have ample capacity (whereas Hetzner had less reliable peering). I have several servers in the OVH network in Europe and I get consistently high speeds for Europe&US, independent of the time I test (don't have much traffic from Asia so can't really test that).

They will offer you better peering if you pay extra, but even then you're paying much less than at AWS for high traffic.

I suspect that AWS makes most profit with bandwidth while other services run with a very low margin.

[1] http://weathermap.ovh.net/

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#568

Post by acron0 » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 10:21 AM UTC

RUG3Y wrote: post #126

infinitone wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its all about the over-ear mate.. over-ear..

Haha ok...I guess technically I'm wearing "over-ear" headphones right now. Hyper-X...pretty cheap gaming headset, extremely comfortable, no flashing led lights or other weird gamer features. Decent sound too.

+1 My HyperX Cloud 2's are the only over-ear headset I'll ever use again. Fantastic sound, build quality and comfort.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#569

Post by dx034 » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 10:22 AM UTC

Veen wrote: post #36

I think a million VPS hosting companies just cried out in terror. The major reason to use a VPS host instead of AWS is that AWS is complicated. This seems to be just as simple as DO or a million other VPS hosts, with the added benefit that it's easy to hook up to Amazon's other services if you need to.

Until their clients see the iops of Lightsail's non-local SSDs. Don't know of any other VPS provider that uses network as their only storage. Small boxes will likely not run a memory-only job (they only have 1GB), so I doubt that Lightsail will be used for much more than reverse-proxying traffic from AWS to get huge discounts there.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#570

Post by setq » Thu, Dec 01, 2016, 10:22 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #342

setq wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't complaining about that. I've had 2-3 day turnarounds on "everything is broken" events on normal AWS VPC. Always factor their support offering in as well.

What level of support did you have? I've been on developer or first-level business support, and generally get someone knowledgeable; only the timing changes. The only bad experience I had was with SES - we got blocked by high bounce rate, sending to a test email that did not exist (specifically because it was a test email). It took two days for the special unblock team to unblock us, even though the general support g…

Zero to start with, now business. Business is "ok" - sometimes takes a couple of attempts to get someone who knows what they are talking about.