Why we moved away from AWS

#1

Post by karli » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 1:40 PM UTC

Why we moved away from AWS
blippex.github.io

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#2

Post by lazyant » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:01 PM UTC

Another comparison between AWS and VPS hosting. AWS is a Lego with many pieces, if you just use one piece (EC2) you may be better off with the cheaper alternatives.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#3

Post by eminh » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:04 PM UTC

I currently spend ~$2000 on Softlayer for six servers and use about 30TB of bandwidth. On AWS I would have paid more just for that bandwidth.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#4

Post by eterm » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:04 PM UTC

EC2 was designed for elastic computing. On demand high computation (low memory) that are elastic.

With that in mind, pure EC2 is a terrible choice for general web application hosting.

If using the complete AWS set (S3, simpleDB, etc) then it makes more sense as stuff like db hosting can be pushed out to their services designed for it, but if you're gonna fire up a windows box, stick SQL server on there and use it as a general web app hosting environment then it is a terrible choice.

Unfortunately, it's a choice that still appears to be easy for management to justify: It doesn't require a server admin to use, it doesn't require mirroring or backups because obviously amazon EBS volumes can't die because they're in the cloud. The extra cost and lower performance is obviously just an Ok side effect of these benefits.

(Yes, I'm being sarcastic here, but it's all arguments I've seen made.)

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#5

Post by eterm » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:07 PM UTC

lazyant wrote: post #2

Another comparison between AWS and VPS hosting. AWS is a Lego with many pieces, if you just use one piece (EC2) you may be better off with the cheaper alternatives.

This isn't even comparing AWS and other VPS, it's comparing EC2 with a dedicated server.

But actually from what I've seen in the wild, a lot of people just use EC2 without the rest of AWS for just general server hosting, so it's a useful reminder not to do this unless you don't care about the bottom line. (And who doesn't?)

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#6

Post by rb2k_ » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:08 PM UTC

AWS 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), queueing services, ...

- ...

Amazon provides a lot of things that cheaper solutions will have a hard time achieving (e.g. the backup space redundancy that OVH provides will probably be quite a bit less 'secure' than S3/Glacier).

That being said, these premium features are something that a project might simply not need. We run some of our jenkins build slaves on OVH. We don't need to launch new ones all that often and the bang for the buck makes them very much worth considering.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#7

Post by icoder » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:11 PM UTC

I think these are good points! I've been held back by AWS prices as well, especially during bootstrapping they are rather high.

The downside you mention at the end, regarding setup time: we use CloudVPS, a Dutch based company that keeps upping its service in the direction of AWS (currently, when your billing status is OK, new VPS-es are setup without human interaction, not milliseconds but still fast enough for most use cases, for new customers you're running a free trial within a working day or so).

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#8

Post by notacoward » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:11 PM UTC

AWS 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 see how much they suck in terms of cycles, packets, or disk writes per dollar. They still have the most advanced feature set, they have by far the best public-cloud network I've used (out of nearly twenty), there are still good reasons to use them for some things, but don't go there to reduce permanent-infrastructure costs.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#9

Post by ksec » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:16 PM UTC

1. A Correction to that post is there isn't MANY provider that are around the same price. He said Hetzner. And that is like the ONLY other provider for the same price. And in many cases OVH offers better value then Hetzner.

2. The problem the post mention about OVH not being elastic. That is simply true with every other dedicated provider. ( Actually StormOnDemand offers Dedicated at per minutes pricing ) . But OVH should have their Public Cloud ready in October. Which means you get a Hybrid of Cloud and Dedicated.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#10

Post by karli » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 2:21 PM UTC

eterm wrote: post #4

EC2 was designed for elastic computing. On demand high computation (low memory) that are elastic. With that in mind, pure EC2 is a terrible choice for general web application hosting. If using the complete AWS set (S3, simpleDB, etc) then it makes more sense as stuff like db hosting can be pushed out to their services designed for it, but if you're gonna fire up a windows box, stick SQL server on there and use it as…

As i said in the blogpost, we still love AWS, its awesome, we used it for many other projects and S3 is great in combination with EC2, but in some cases it makes sense to think about it, maybe it saves you something!

As i said, we really miss the simplicity of AWS, one mouse click and you have a loadbalancer, ec.

PS: trust me, AWS EBS volume can die, and this is a pain! :)