When the company gets big, the best deal is.. surprise.. running your own DC with an AWS-like system for the devs.
Much cheaper, also much faster..
Of course, using old school deployment is a mistake (slow, pisses off devs, etc.)
Why we moved away from AWS
71–80 of 102 posts
Re: Why we moved away from AWS
#72The $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…
Yes, $750 is about one engineer-day. Someone is now going to be spending at least a full day per month managing your new hardware, running security patches, etc. Even if your sysadmin guy is cheaper than an "engineer" it's not going to be cheap.
You realize you need to do all that on the EC2 instances as well, right?
This is the common disconnect I see when people tout The Cloud as a solution to having system administrators - that somehow that instance of Linux running in EC2 doesn't require the same maintenance as a physical one. It does.
Re: Why we moved away from AWS
#73Earlier 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…
We did a test of an EC2 data centre setup vs. our existing physical data centre setup and the largest issue - that is, if you ignore the 3x cost - is the network latency and general quality of the local network in the availability zones.
No amount of optimization could eliminate the 100-150ms penalty imposed by the EC2 network vs. our dedicated hardware. The local network was congested and "noisy" in the sense that ping times were highly variable and had high packet loss, and the number of hops to the internet at large were high, and the baseline latency to the world was also high.
As for instance lifespan, we had numerous instances just "disappear" and then needed to be recreated. We were running a hundred or so for our test so YMMV.
Re: Why we moved away from AWS
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you can pay much less than half that via custom server builds and colocation. It is just a matter of how far down the chain you want to go, given your expertise and sensitivity to hardware costs.
He doesn't actually have to keep replacement parts in the datacenter or have staff close by to the datacenter to go and perform replacements or new installs, or worse - pay >100$/hr. for remote hands with colo. Over time it's certainly more expensive to rent, but you get to cancel and move on to better hardware when it comes out, without having to worry about re-purposing or selling old servers.
I don't keep hardware spares for my 300+ infrastructure as our hardware provider has 24 hour turnaround on warranty replacements.
As for re-purposing, I have tons of uses for older hardware to do background computation or other jobs. I suspect I can extend the lifetime to 5+ years on most of it, which is quite good in my opinion. You just need to design your system with modularity in mind, which you should be doing regardless of your hosting choices.
Re: Why we moved away from AWS
#75AWS was really cool back in 2007, but the truth is their pricing has not come down in line with the decreasing cost of computing over the years and now its pretty expensive.
Re: Why we moved away from AWS
#76My current startup is using AWS for everything and I have to admit I was eager to get my hands on it since it seems to me that familiarity with AWS will be a good thing for me personally and professionally.
I almost get a sense that people are signing up for AWS because, well I'm not positive about this, but it seems like its trendy. Possibly some startups don't realize AWS is just providing you with pre-installed systems that you can easily install yourself? I don't think it's a bad decision necessarily because depending on your size you may not want to devote any time to configuring servers. Maybe some people who have made that choice could set me straight?
My gut is telling me that, for my current situation, the main benefit of AWS - the automatic scaling - will be quite expensive that by the time we actually do need to scale. So we will be probably looking elsewhere for hosting at some point int the future. Much like the article suggests.
Re: Why we moved away from AWS
#77AWS 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.
"My team's time is easily worth $500-600/hr"
Clearly not.
Re: Why we moved away from AWS
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Cloud Monitoring (disclaimer: I work on it) can actually be configured to poll as often as every 30 seconds from each location, or just every 30 seconds in the case of agent checks. I believe we default to 1 minute intervals, but if you want to change it you can browse to your check in our Control Panel and click the little edit icon where it says "Period: 60 seconds".
This is either brand new (within the last few weeks) or your coworkers don't know anything about it. The whole monitoring thing has been a farce for a year or more, as it's been coming real soon now, then in beta, then severely limited, then costs money, etc.
Re: Why we moved away from AWS
#79I am planning to move from AWS to Linode mainly because of performance. My app is CPU intensive. I think for such apps you need to take high end EC2 instance.. I tried with small and medium instances but found them quite slow. With linode 8 core small instances, I could handle 2-3 times the traffic. However from management perspective AWS rules.
If your app is CPU intensive then why wouldn't you look at dedicated ?
Switching to Linode is always a terrible idea considering how disgraceful their security and business practices are.
Re: Why we moved away from AWS
#80AWS isn't really a solution for people trying to run a "small" project on a fixed amount of servers 24/7. It's great if you want to be able to: - provision lots of machines without delays - launch and terminate new instances to cover load spikes - do geo-redundant failover (aka: a datacenter in Europe, Australia, the US, ...) - have 'plug and play' components like load balancers (ELB), storage (S3), databases (RDS),…
I would have thought build slaves would be a great fit for AWS, since you can boot them up as needed, and turn them off when not needed(Night).
We run some Virtualbox builds on them which AWS doesn't support.
Our build slaves are pretty busy (I'd say jobs running 16+ hours a day). There isn't really that much possible cost saving towards an OVH server :)
Also: HDD performance on "basic" Amazon is slow and RAM is expensive :(