71–80 of 191 posts
These services make it an easy decision to stick on AWS, and sadly ec2 as well
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 pe…
If you have "users", then you might be right, as no harm will be done, if once in a few years, their free service will be shutdown for 18 hours.
However, if your customers are running core and critical parts of their business on your system, this part becomes a significant factor in the equation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that everytime you want to have access to your money you have to go to the bank and line up. Then randomly the bank won't work, all banks in the region will shut down randomly and you're stuck without money, and you need to pay rent but you can't. You are invested in certain banks in the region but sometime s it feels like the bank has noisy neighbours, and it takes a while to withdraw money.
So what you're saying is the mattress is better or that the mattress is a false analogy? I'm happy to pay a premium to not have to worry about the countless things that AWS deals with. Whenever people complain about AWS having downtime I have to wonder how sure they are that their uptime track record would be better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
EC2 is more expensive than renting dedicated hardware. Housing/power/cooling/networking/etc are all built-in to that price, not added costs. Colocating your own hardware is not the only option. You can provision someone else's dedicated hardware in under an hour, all costs included, with 24/7 on-site staff to handle failed components or other issues (which again are included in the price).
I'm speccing out some things I host on AWS on softlayer's dedicated hosting, and I'm not coming up with vastly cheaper prices there either. I can get big (compared to ec2) servers cheap but storage costs eat up most of the advantage.
Hetzner and OVH provide the starkest contrast when it comes to price. They are also pretty well respected.
There's a million other choices in between. webhostingtalk.com is the best place to get more info..but I can give you names that have been around for a long time and tend to be liked by customers: webnx, singlehop, 100tb (softlayer reseller), reliablesite.net, hivelocity, netdepot. The list goes on and on, but if you want to see price differences, check them out.
As a consultant recently I was tasked to build a service which (rather not say), I had good data on requests per day, total data storage, factored in ELB, etc.
The cost was less than 2K a year. Now consider that the company refused to buy hardware or pay anyone to support it because they had a full staff of sysops maintaining their (rather not say) at great cost in their own data center.
2K is absolutely nothing to a company. Most of us are not Netflix or Dropbox. Don't pretend you have those kinds of problems if you don't. It could have cost 3x that per year and they still wouldn't have noticed it.
AWS for manageable workloads is dirt cheap at scale. I think you'd have to be nuts not to use it.
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 server…
If you're making a fairly standard webapp, what does it provide you that, e.g. softlayer or linode does not? How much of AWS' popularity come from it just being a safe choice, like a cloud version of "No One Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM"?
AWS' popularity comes not just from the wide array of decent, well integrated and cohesive services e.g. S3, SQS, ELB, ElastiCache but also all of the third party services that are hosted within the AWS network e.g. MongoHQ, IronMQ/IronIO. AWS is very much an ecosystem.
If you are building a new app from scratch there a lot of benefits to having others manage the commodity parts of your infrastructure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you globally distributed? Are you using CloudFront? Those are cheap services which improve speed dramatically.
Yes and yes, we're using a CDN. Neither of those change that EC2 instances are slow and have unreliable performance, and the network is abstracted to the point where you can't effectively control packet flow.
Network is, in fact, a major player in the latency, and by being globally distributed, configuring Route53 appropriately, and integrating CloudFront CDN, a given web-app gets a boost that I doubt a faster computer can beat.
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…
It's not just a question of speed. If your machines are slow, that means you need more machines to handle your throughput, which means you are paying for that 20 ms slowdown in actual dollars.
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…
> 1. AWS beats all others when it comes to security [1]. While the compliance and security links are impressive, AWS still doesn't offer a BAA agreement for HIPAA/HITECH compliance. There are plenty of health care companies that are held back from AWS for this single reason. Surprisingly enough Microsoft is leading in this respect (or not, given their historical enterprise focus...) - http://www.windowsazure.com/en-u…
Updated: AWS also has a whitepaper on Creating HIPAA-Compliant Medical Data Applications with AWS [2]. Looks like this is support on the standard non GovCloud stack.
[1] http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2011/08/16/announc...
[2] http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_HIPAA_Whitepaper_Fina...
The first letter in EC2 stands for elastic. If you aren't using EC2 for it's elasticity then you're probably doing it wrong. Kind of a no-brainer.
And of course, the second letter stands for compute. If you find yourself using words like traffic instead of computation and discussing the finer points of the per-hour billing feature instead of how many CPU-hours of jobs are enqueued, you should definitely consider that you're trying to use a tool that wasn't designed with your needs in mind.
That said, AWS in general has a lot of useful tools for web developers, and certainly one use-case of an elastic compute cloud is temporary development instances.