Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
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Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
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Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#2- No one pick a host based on a single microbenchmark, please. Game out what your app would need to achieve your target performance level with what each host offers. Amazon still might lose (sounds like that happened with TripAdvisor) but at least you've made your decision a sane way.
- For the best price, you'd want to use a reserved instance if this is a webserver, and perhaps a spot instance if it's a batch/HPC task. You'd want to use high-CPU instances if you really are all about quickly sorting 5M numbers. If your app is or might be come database-bound, DB perf's super key.
- I'd love to hear more broadly about the practical differences between the clouds--whether anyone seems to be better at managing noisy neighbors than the next guy, network and I/O performance, etc. One CPU-bound task can't really be the end of it.
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#3Anybody else want to share their experience with Joyent versus EC2? I'm considering doing the switch as my EC2 bill is getting a little expensive.
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#4After seeing this, I thought I would spin up a server with Joyent, just to give it a try. After 10 minutes, the server is still not marked as "provisioning," which seems like an excessive amount of time.
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#5From the article (its conclusion) :
"Amazon need to lift their game in terms of CPU performance. They offer a great service that obviously extends far beyond a simple CPU benchmark. But when you can get the same work done in Joyent significantly faster for the comparable price, you’ll get far more mileage per instance, which is ultimately going to save the dollars."
Or, "Wow, Amazon sure makes bank on this EC2 stuff, they are selling kilo-core-seconds for a bunch more than Joyent is and they are still the most widely used provider."
There have been a couple of good benchmarks around which instances get you the most 'bang' for the buck, but its pretty clear that Amazon is making a ton of money here.
A good comparison is a rack of 40 SuperMicro 1U dual socket servers with 192G of ram in them. You can create 480 dedicated instances with 16 GB of RAM each, and run the whole thing in a colo facility for $5K/month (power, networking, and floor space). That is 0.2 cents per second, or a bit more than $10/month running them 100% of the time.
Not a bad business to be in.
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#6Sorting 5 million random numbers takes ~20secs - and this is the fastest benchmark?
Wait there buddy.... First of all, why would OS choice be of so much significance here, after all this is all executed mainly on the CPU (not much IO). The only difference would be that the random() function might return different things on different systems (libc difference?)... or maybe not (I'm not familiar with ruby's internals).
So I'm not sure what this measures at all...
At least you can run the benchmark shootout (CPU), or something that can test the I/O.
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#7After seeing this, I thought I would spin up a server with Joyent, just to give it a try. After 10 minutes, the server is still not marked as "provisioning," which seems like an excessive amount of time.
I've had quiet a bit of experience provisioning machines on Joyent. 95% things work flawlessly, with 20-40 second boot times. However occasionally I'll get 10m+ boot times or machines that just fail to boot. Sounds like you got unlucky. Delete that machine and try again.
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#8I haven't tried out Joyent, but I've tested out Linode and Storm-on-Demand and they easily beat Amazon EC2. My benchmark was running our production image processing algorithm that utilizes OpenCV via python on Ubuntu Server (definitely CPU-limited).
FWIW, here are my benchmarks, along with pricing for Northern California regions:
Linode 512: 15.2 seconds, 65 cents per day
Storm-on-demand 1 GB: 13.05 seconds, 5 cents per hour
EC2-micro: 168 seconds, 2.5 cents per hour
EC2-small: 63 seconds, 9 cents per hour
EC2-medium (high CPU): 12.13 seconds, 18.6 cents per hour
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#9Anybody else want to share their experience with Joyent versus EC2? I'm considering doing the switch as my EC2 bill is getting a little expensive.
At my last job, I did some evaluation between EC2 and Joyent with a node.js based application. Hands down, Joyent beat EC2 up -- there wasn't an explicit 1:1 correlation anywhere close, as I was seeing the performance with a m1.large go in line with what I was seeing for a small instance at joyent.
When you got right down to it, what killed that plan was that you were still using Amazon S3 for storage; the money that we would have saved in CPU/processor time we would be eaten alive with transferring that data back to S3.
Re: Comparing Amazon EC2 to Joyent SmartOS
#10For Windows servers, Joyent is prohibitively more expensive than EC2... though their Linux prices trounce AWS' significantly. I wonder why that is. They also don't offer anything smaller than "medium".
Does anyone know a good cloud-based Windows host as an alternative to AWS?