Why We Moved Off The Cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#81

Post by gpapilion » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 10:40 PM UTC

shaggy wrote: post #8

The cloud became the new hot thing and lots and lots of people, sites, enterprises jumped on board. Need to quickly deploy code without any understanding of how infrastructure works? Great, the cloud solves your problem! Who needs experienced infrastructure people anyway? Need to quickly respond to a spike in traffic? Great, the cloud solves your problem! Need guaranteed SLAs, reliable CPU, memory and disk performanc…

When I did a comparison of co-located vs. managed vs. cloud my numbers broken down as such:

co-lo: 1x cost managed: 1.5-2x cost cloud: 2.25-4x cost

This was with headcount changes figured into the pricing. (We did not see a head count reduction when using EC2)

The primary advantage the cloud offered was that it was an operating expense without a contract, and that you could turn systems off when not used.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#82

Post by blantonl » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 10:41 PM UTC

jwegan wrote: post #63

Rackspace's primary business is dedicated hosting. In fact they let you have both dedicated hosts and cloud hosts and allow dedicated and cloud hosts to talk to each other. I'm curious why they didn't just switch to Rackspace's dedicated hosting. It would have given them the performance they needed while retaining the flexibility of being able to quickly spin up cloud machines in the same datacenter as the dedicated…

because Rackspace is very expensive. They are awesome, but they are expensive on the dedicated side.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#83

Post by jedberg » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 10:43 PM UTC

skeletonjelly wrote: post #77

jedberg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate all the terms because they are all buzzword lingo. :)

You've just lost your synergy jedberg.

I realize I use the buzzword on my linkedin. I may hate the term, but I still have to play the game, right?

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#84

Post by imbriaco » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 10:47 PM UTC

towelrod wrote: post #61

jedberg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The moment a popular site like Reddit switches to the cloud, is the moment it becomes barely usable during certain times of the day. That's completely false. The moment reddit blogged about moving to the cloud, it was * perceived* as being slower. The cloud move happened 7 months before the blog post came out.

I think the OP just meant that once someone like reddit moves into your cloud, your performance goes down. Meaning, the hardware that my little blog is on works great until that hardware also hosting reddit, and then my blog takes a beating because reddit is thrashing away with actual activity.

Not if the cloud you're running your workload on is large enough. The Amazon Web Services cloud could absorb many Reddit sized sites without any other customers experiencing an impact. AWS is _enormous_.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#85

Post by icebraining » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 10:49 PM UTC

chime wrote: post #55

papercruncher wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud implies running in virtualized environment. Dedicated implies that only your bits run on that hardware which is huge for I/O.

> Cloud implies running in virtualized environment. Unfortunately, 'cloud' implies nothing. Apple's iCloud isn't necessarily storing my data using VMs and EBS/BigTable type FS. They could be using dedicated W2K/IIS 4.0 boxes storing BLOBs in MSSQL and still be considered cloud by everyone.

VIrtualized doesn't mean VMs. It means you access some computing service, where the backend is abstracted away - effectively, virtualized.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#86

Post by joevandyk » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 10:50 PM UTC

I'd be interested if they were only using EBS storage. I wouldn't use EBS for anything that was latency sensitive. I've found instance-only storage to be much faster and consistent.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#87

Post by AdamGibbins » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 10:50 PM UTC

kqueue wrote: post #72

This service provider has great pricing compared to softlayer http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr... Intel Corei7-2600 Quad core + 16GB DDR3 + 2 x 3TB 7200 for 49 euro.

The quality of service and network is also widely different and varied. Hetzner are awesome for the cost, don't get me wrong. But at times their network is terrible and their service seems to vary hugely.

You don't get these problems with Softlayer, you pay significantly more and get significantly better almost-guaranteed service.

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#88

Post by rayhano » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 10:59 PM UTC

Finally! A balanced explanation of the differences

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#89

Post by larrys » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 11:01 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #48

You didn't abandon "the cloud", you just switched providers. You're still paying someone else for servers that you don't own (unless softlayer ships you those machines after 3 years). This is why I hate the term "the cloud" -- because it is too nebulous and non-descriptive.

"it is too nebulous and non-descriptive"

Agree but wouldn't you say that sole use of physical hardware (whether or not you own or lease that hardware and regardless of physical location) is really the issue that separates cloud from non cloud?

Example:

We have servers that we own in our offices.

We have servers that we own in colocation.

We have some dedicated virtual servers at MT http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/dv/

I consider the MT servers cloud since the hardware is shared. And what we are paying for is simply memory, transfer and disk space. I don't even know what hardware we are running on there and I don't know anyone else that is running on that hardware either.

But I would also consider the servers in the office and the colocated servers non-cloud even if they were leased (which they are not).

Re: Why We Moved Off The Cloud

#90

Post by kqueue » Thu, Oct 27, 2011, 11:02 PM UTC

AdamGibbins wrote: post #87

kqueue wrote: post #72

This service provider has great pricing compared to softlayer http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr... Intel Corei7-2600 Quad core + 16GB DDR3 + 2 x 3TB 7200 for 49 euro.

The quality of service and network is also widely different and varied. Hetzner are awesome for the cost, don't get me wrong. But at times their network is terrible and their service seems to vary hugely. You don't get these problems with Softlayer, you pay significantly more and get significantly better almost-guaranteed service.

I see. I haven't tried them personally, my friend has been using them for a year now and so far so good. He did complain about their support though.