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With EC2 available, why be in the hardware as well as the software business? Life seems to short to have to worry about hardware and hardware scaling - especia

With EC2 available, why be in the hardware as well as the software business? Life seems to short to have to worry about hardware and hardware scaling - especially things like the story of rounding up 100 servers over the weekend to handle demand when you could just deploy as many EC2 instances as you need in a few keystrokes in a few minutes, or this problem of a misconfigured switch.

spolsky 19y ago
what do you do when Amazon misconfigures their switch?
- gibsonf1 19y ago
  If something like that we're to happen, we'd fire up another instance and reroute - in 3 minutes from our desk.
  - noonespecial 19y ago
    On Amazons "Black Swan" day, there will be on new instances to fire up. Your current instance and all of its data may well be lost. Your little account will be the last thing they're worried about restoring. EC2 is great for startups, but when the time comes, you need a multi-homed, multi-located setup you've done yourself so you know what risks are involved.
    - boucher 19y ago
      Who's to say that Amazon hasn't deployed a "multi-homed, multi-located" setup, or that yours would be any more reliable than theirs? I don't necessarily care about knowing all the potential points of failure, especially if I believe they employ people who know more about the equipment than I do. You could argue that the only reason to build your own data center is if you believe you can do it better than Amazon, if of course you can match your architecture to their system.
rcoder 19y ago
There are a number of reasons not to put critical business systems on top of EC2. First and foremost, if you don't have control of who can physically access your hardware, you can't make any real assurances about the privacy and integrity of your data. I don't care how much you trust Amazon with your personal credit card and shipping information -- you are taking a big risk putting your customers' data there, too. Secondly, EC2 has no SLA at all. Given Joel's (strong) argument about the limited usefulness of SLAs in general, that may not seem like a big deal, but the lack of any firm commitment on Amazon's part pretty much means that you're SOL if there are any major problems. Finally, EC2 absolutely does not protect you from issues like mis-configured network hardware. Amazon may have incredibly redundant connectivity, including data centers in different geographic regions, but that redundancy doesn't necessarily benefit your virtual machines in the way it does Amazon's core business applications. One VM instance is still tied to one physical box hosting it, and if that box goes down, you'll lose that host and any data it hasn't flushed elsewhere on the network. That's not to say that EC2 doesn't have its uses; I just couldn't imagine putting your mission-critical apps on it. Stick with prototyping, testing, batch-processing, and the occasional extra capacity for unexpected spikes in load, and you should be fine.
- gibsonf1 19y ago
  1. Without password and encryption keys, access to the hardware is meaningless from a data security perspective. 2. I am pretty confident that Amazon's ability to keep the computers running is better than most other options. And unless their entire service goes down as well as the entire S3 grid, we can very quickly launch a new instance with no data loss (we have a hyperactive back up strategy to S3 to prevent data loss in case of an EC2 instance failure) 3. We can launch a new instance in a very few minutes. So if anything, this seems like an ideal environment where uptime is extremely good, and in the case of a failure, recovery is extremely fast. I'm not sure where we can get similar service? The S3 is especially good in terms of multiple backups in different regions - hard to beat for assuring business clients who can't afford to loose data that their data won't be lost.
  - run4yourlives 19y ago
run4yourlives 19y ago
Security, for one. If you have sensitive client data, EC2/S3 is not for you.

spolsky 19y ago

what do you do when Amazon misconfigures their switch?

gibsonf1 19y ago
If something like that we're to happen, we'd fire up another instance and reroute - in 3 minutes from our desk.
- noonespecial 19y ago
  On Amazons "Black Swan" day, there will be on new instances to fire up. Your current instance and all of its data may well be lost. Your little account will be the last thing they're worried about restoring. EC2 is great for startups, but when the time comes, you need a multi-homed, multi-located setup you've done yourself so you know what risks are involved.
  - boucher 19y ago
    Who's to say that Amazon hasn't deployed a "multi-homed, multi-located" setup, or that yours would be any more reliable than theirs? I don't necessarily care about knowing all the potential points of failure, especially if I believe they employ people who know more about the equipment than I do. You could argue that the only reason to build your own data center is if you believe you can do it better than Amazon, if of course you can match your architecture to their system.

rcoder 19y ago

There are a number of reasons not to put critical business systems on top of EC2. First and foremost, if you don't have control of who can physically access your hardware, you can't make any real assurances about the privacy and integrity of your data. I don't care how much you trust Amazon with your personal credit card and shipping information -- you are taking a big risk putting your customers' data there, too. Secondly, EC2 has no SLA at all. Given Joel's (strong) argument about the limited usefulness of SLAs in general, that may not seem like a big deal, but the lack of any firm commitment on Amazon's part pretty much means that you're SOL if there are any major problems. Finally, EC2 absolutely does not protect you from issues like mis-configured network hardware. Amazon may have incredibly redundant connectivity, including data centers in different geographic regions, but that redundancy doesn't necessarily benefit your virtual machines in the way it does Amazon's core business applications. One VM instance is still tied to one physical box hosting it, and if that box goes down, you'll lose that host and any data it hasn't flushed elsewhere on the network. That's not to say that EC2 doesn't have its uses; I just couldn't imagine putting your mission-critical apps on it. Stick with prototyping, testing, batch-processing, and the occasional extra capacity for unexpected spikes in load, and you should be fine.

gibsonf1 19y ago
1. Without password and encryption keys, access to the hardware is meaningless from a data security perspective. 2. I am pretty confident that Amazon's ability to keep the computers running is better than most other options. And unless their entire service goes down as well as the entire S3 grid, we can very quickly launch a new instance with no data loss (we have a hyperactive back up strategy to S3 to prevent data loss in case of an EC2 instance failure) 3. We can launch a new instance in a very few minutes. So if anything, this seems like an ideal environment where uptime is extremely good, and in the case of a failure, recovery is extremely fast. I'm not sure where we can get similar service? The S3 is especially good in terms of multiple backups in different regions - hard to beat for assuring business clients who can't afford to loose data that their data won't be lost.
- run4yourlives 19y ago

run4yourlives 19y ago

Security, for one. If you have sensitive client data, EC2/S3 is not for you.