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Why we moved away from AWS

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Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#91

Post by vacri »

oijaf888 wrote: post #65
LanceH wrote: post #24

There is a dead spot between using EC2 on demand and paying for the 3 year reserved instance, both of which I've found to be practical. At both ends of that spectrum, however, I've found the pricing to be fairly reasonable. It just might not work for a startup.

How is the 3 year reserved instance practical given Amazon tends to cut prices significantly in a 3 year span? I've seen 1 year terms make sense but never 3 year.

Talking with our account manager, he mentions that the 1-year term is what most people go for anyway - you won't get caught short with long-term price drops, and you have more flexibility when business demands change. Overprovisioned capacity is less painful when there's only 6 months left rather than 30 months...

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#92

Post by alanning »

leokun wrote: post #13

If you move to Rackspace, stay away from DWS, the dallas datacenter. It's over-booked, the network has constant issues, vm's on the same host machine as you are able to cause your vm network issues, the list of problems never stops. We recently switched to Azure from Rackspace, but we're still evaluating if it will work for us long term. Azure's issues are that you have to request number of core increases, and you ca…

Just to add another data point, we've been using a 4GB cloud server in the Dallas datacenter for 9 months now and it has been solid. (Solid meaning works as expected, no outages/problems.)

Maybe we lucked out with who else is sharing the hardware.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#93

Post by regularfry »

vacri wrote: post #87
nasalgoat wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, you don't really. You don't need to spend time considering and researching different load balancers to see which one is the best for your use-case, running through your company's purchase process (in itself a big project), lead time, physical install, configuration, and monitoring. If you want an AWS load balancer, click EC2 > Load Balancers and config one. From "Hey, I'd like a load balancer" to having a functio…

This is why we have managed hosting. You can pay someone else to do all that, on a real, physical server, on a network they manage, and have it still come out as much cheaper than AWS. Yes, the turnaround time might be more than 5 minutes. Or, depending on who you go to, it might be less.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#95

Post by mechanical_fish »

nasalgoat wrote: post #72
consultant23522 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely you didn't mean to type "physical". Even if Amazon did nothing else, they'd still order, receive, unpack, assemble, rack, stack, power, cool, and network their servers with an economy of scale that I can't possibly match.

And who could ever claim that AWS requires no maintenance? It takes plenty; I should know. But the problem isn't that Amazon is necessarily less expensive, or more expensive, or more reliable, or less reliable. All of that depends on the context. The problem is that the context is rarely reported in this genre of blog post. These posts tend to fixate on the size of the hosting bill. This is the year 2013, and unless its business model is hopelessly flawed, the hosting bill is one of the smallest problems a new company will ever have.

But maybe I'm wrong about that, so I wish these writeups would provide more context to explain why I'm wrong in this or that particular case, and by how much. Yes, I see the hosting bill is down. But are the savings significant to the business? Did the migration take one engineer-day, or twelve, or thirty-eight? Did it reduce the size of the codebase or increase it, and which modules were affected? Is the time required for testing and reliable deployment up or down, and by how much? How has your planning for various disaster scenarios changed? Are you getting more or fewer alerts in the middle of the night?

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#96

Post by fourstar »

threeseed wrote: post #79
zerop wrote: post #21

I 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.

> Switching to Linode is always a terrible idea considering how disgraceful their security and business practices are.

Can you please elaborate on this? I just signed up, so I'm curious.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#97

Post by dredmorbius »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #57
Spooky23 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does your anecdote translate to other organizations, though? In my own case, my company ditched AWS in favour of getting our own rack with about 10 custom servers. We have a full-time sysadmin, so nobody's time was wasted on the transition; whatever stuff the developers (who are also $500-600/hr people) were needed for during that time was valuable, because it forced us to rewrite the deployment system, which would h…

who are also $500-600/hr people

Did you sneak an extra zero in there? Even fully-realized, I'd $100-$200/hr tops in a prime market.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#98

Post by mechanical_fish »

laxk wrote: post #85
tlb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about right for salary + payroll tax + benefits + office space in Silicon Valley.

It is true for Silicon Valley but not for the country.

I have, uh, pretty convincing evidence that $750/day is in the ballpark for the fully-loaded cost of a devops engineer in Boston. It certainly doesn't buy two days of an engineer in Boston.

But Boston is Boston, and SV is SV, and this is estimation, so I'll happily concede a factor of two. Okay. Suppose $750 buys you two engineer-days per month. Same question: Is the $750 important?

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#99

Post by lobster_johnson »

dredmorbius wrote: post #97
lobster_johnson wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your anecdote translate to other organizations, though? In my own case, my company ditched AWS in favour of getting our own rack with about 10 custom servers. We have a full-time sysadmin, so nobody's time was wasted on the transition; whatever stuff the developers (who are also $500-600/hr people) were needed for during that time was valuable, because it forced us to rewrite the deployment system, which would h…

who are also $500-600/hr people Did you sneak an extra zero in there? Even fully-realized, I'd $100-$200/hr tops in a prime market.

My apologies -- yes. I was actually thinking in a different currency.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#100

Post by thejosh »

leokun wrote: post #29
thejosh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many server(s) did you have with RS? We only have 2 mid-sized virtual servers in DFW and things have been working flawlessly for us..

It's because you only have 2 servers, which reduces the likelihood that you're sharing a host machine with a misbehaving vm. You're probably also not using a load balancer or taxing the network much yourself.

Yep!

That's why I was asking about the performance with more VMs, I don't use many virtual servers at RS for my day job.

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