5 ms·

EC2 Instance Update – X1 (SAP HANA) and T2.Nano (Websites)

94 points by runesoerensen 11y ago

late2part 11y ago
Very cool. I'm not an AMZN or AWS fanboy, but this is really neat stuff, and very impressive how much they continue to increase their market lead.
- tkinom 11y ago
  Cool for AWS. I still like Digital Ocean better.
  - rubiquity 11y ago
    It's certainly easier to launch a droplet on Digital Ocean but Security Groups and VPCs save so much time for just about any application I've ever put in production. I badly want Digital Ocean to have a service similar to Security Groups and VPCs so I don't have to munge my Ansible scripts to setup iptables rules and PKI for encryption between droplets.
    - ju-st 11y ago
      Could you please explain why this is so important for you? I googled a little bit and the only use cases I found were (1) blocking communication between web & db servers and (2) to whitelist SSH only for your corporate network. Thanks!
      - rubiquity 11y ago
        Droplets without private networking communicate over the public internet. Your traffic can be listened to and if it is plain text and if you have sensitive data (every app I've ever worked on always has) then that sensitive data is flying around free and clear. If you have Droplets with private networking you can communicate within that data center but other Droplets in the data center could still eavesdrop on your packets. To feel secure you need to encrypt data that goes between your droplets. As for iptables: if you don't need a port open, don't open it.
- monksy 11y ago
  I just wish there was a good competitor that bundled the other services like they do.
  - nullrouted 11y ago
    Both Azure and GCE are competitors, both have pretty feature rich clouds. They may not have feature parity but I'm guessing what they do have fits 70-80% of peoples needs (Compute, Database, Storage, DNS, Load Balancing).
kimcheekumquat 11y ago
>X1 instances will feature up to 2 TB of memory, a full order of magnitude larger than the current generation of high-memory instances. These instances are designed for demanding enterprise workloads including production installations of SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, Apache Spark, and Presto. >The X1 instances will be powered by up to four Intel® Xeon® E7 processors. The processors have high memory bandwidth and large L3 caches, both designed to support high-performance, memory-bound applications. With over 100 vCPUs, these instances will be able to handle highly concurrent workloads with ease. Can't wait to launch one of these.
- kchoudhu 11y ago
  I assume I'll have to declare personal bankruptcy as soon as I launch one.
  - jewel 11y ago
    As a point of comparison, the Dedibox Extreme SP launched in 2013 and has 1TB of RAM and costs €1899.99/month. http://documentation.online.net/en/serveur-dedie/offres/serveur-dedibox-extreme-sp/server-extreme-sp http://documentation.online.net/en/serveur-dedie/offres/serv...
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Physical servers at other providers are almost universally cheaper than AWS. At AWS, you're paying for it to be in your same account, have access to your other AWS resources, etc. EDIT: This is not to hate on AWS. I love AWS! (I do devops and infrastructure). Its to say, if you need what AWS offers, buy it. If you don't, architect your solution around other providers.
      - motoboi 11y ago
        Don't forget the insanely good availability, and the low level management AWS guys do for you.
trjordan 11y ago
I know it's happening, but I'm so surprised to see them cater to technologies like SAP HANA. 3 years ago, there was basically no overlap between people who wanted to run products from SAP/Oracle and people who influenced product offerings from AWS. Obviously, that's different today.
- AndyNemmity 11y ago
  Yeah, I run HANA nodes on AWS, but they are all the small variety. This release will allow the real stuff to run on it, super excited.
- edwinnathaniel 11y ago
  hi @trjordan, long time no hear ;) It's amazing to see the progress from anti-cloud (or private-cloud) to "we're cloud only" within that timeframe (I'm referring to companies that was hard-on on-premise). AFAIK, SAP HANA is being used by NBA (NBA.com/Stats), NFL, NHL (http://www.nhl.com/ice/news.htm?id=754248 http://www.nhl.com/ice/news.htm?id=754248) to provide real time statistics for the whole league. I wonder if they want to move their infrastructure to AWS. PS: I work for SAP
  - AndyNemmity 11y ago
    I know way too much about this to respond, but I'll just say there are a lot of pieces driving this. :)
    - edwinnathaniel 11y ago
      Send me an email :D, would love to hear the story.
  - trjordan 11y ago
    Haha, hey, good to hear from you! My take is that people are doing it piecemeal. The datacenter guys got a mandate to make everything cloudy because of the obvious benefits (scale, provisioning time, lower TCO), but the data / application teams had already invested in something like HANA. If you can just forklift everything up to the cloud, there's at least the theory that you can start to peel off bits as they need to and integrate further with Amazon. If you're starting a streaming ingest process, it's appealing to forklift your existing batch ingest, then use Amazon's services to build the new one. Similar with DB upgrades (RDS), backups (S3 / glacier), or anything else that has a dedicated service. But the first thing to do is get the core application running so you're not trying to patch around some unholy hybrid cloud mess.
nabaraz 11y ago
Hacker news has become AWS news lately. In serious note, I am curious to see pricing structure on X1.
- ShaneOG 11y ago
  AWS re:Invent[0] is taking place this week, so there are a lot of news and announcements. [0] https://reinvent.awsevents.com/ https://reinvent.awsevents.com/
- rubiquity 11y ago
  AWS re:Invent is happening right now which is their big announcement of all sorts of goodies.
- seanwilson 11y ago
  It's because the AWS re:Invent event is on at the moment so there's lots of announcements.
AndyNemmity 11y ago
It'll be nice, I'm in the middle of building a 14 node HANA cluster, and it would be much easier to just have it all on AWS provided I get the same performance. edit: let alone the fact I could take it down when not in use. That's a ridiculously cool thought. the price of this thing all together is insane.
jewel 11y ago
2TB of RAM would cost $31k or so when built out of 32GB chips. I don't know if EC2 is done this way, but imagine if the T2.micro class was running on these servers (to save physical footprint). At 1.3¢ per hour, the server would bring in $227k/year.
garyrichardson 11y ago
"640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates, 1981 I can't wait to spin up a 64 node cluster of these new X1's.
- strictnein 11y ago
  > "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time … I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640 K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again." - Bill Gates, 1996 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed
anacleto 11y ago
I've been through this use-case, AWS re:Invent 2015 – Netflix and AWS http://cloudacademy.com/blog/aws-reinvent-netflix/ http://cloudacademy.com/blog/aws-reinvent-netflix/
nivertech 11y ago
My speculation is that X1 instances is where Amazon QuickSight in-memory BI service is running.

94 points by runesoerensen 11y ago

Very cool. I'm not an AMZN or AWS fanboy, but this is really neat stuff, and very impressive how much they continue to increase their market lead.

tkinom 11y ago
Cool for AWS. I still like Digital Ocean better.
- rubiquity 11y ago
  It's certainly easier to launch a droplet on Digital Ocean but Security Groups and VPCs save so much time for just about any application I've ever put in production. I badly want Digital Ocean to have a service similar to Security Groups and VPCs so I don't have to munge my Ansible scripts to setup iptables rules and PKI for encryption between droplets.
  - ju-st 11y ago
    Could you please explain why this is so important for you? I googled a little bit and the only use cases I found were (1) blocking communication between web & db servers and (2) to whitelist SSH only for your corporate network. Thanks!
    - rubiquity 11y ago
      Droplets without private networking communicate over the public internet. Your traffic can be listened to and if it is plain text and if you have sensitive data (every app I've ever worked on always has) then that sensitive data is flying around free and clear. If you have Droplets with private networking you can communicate within that data center but other Droplets in the data center could still eavesdrop on your packets. To feel secure you need to encrypt data that goes between your droplets. As for iptables: if you don't need a port open, don't open it.
monksy 11y ago
I just wish there was a good competitor that bundled the other services like they do.
- nullrouted 11y ago
  Both Azure and GCE are competitors, both have pretty feature rich clouds. They may not have feature parity but I'm guessing what they do have fits 70-80% of peoples needs (Compute, Database, Storage, DNS, Load Balancing).

kimcheekumquat 11y ago

>X1 instances will feature up to 2 TB of memory, a full order of magnitude larger than the current generation of high-memory instances. These instances are designed for demanding enterprise workloads including production installations of SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, Apache Spark, and Presto. >The X1 instances will be powered by up to four Intel® Xeon® E7 processors. The processors have high memory bandwidth and large L3 caches, both designed to support high-performance, memory-bound applications. With over 100 vCPUs, these instances will be able to handle highly concurrent workloads with ease. Can't wait to launch one of these.

kchoudhu 11y ago
I assume I'll have to declare personal bankruptcy as soon as I launch one.
- jewel 11y ago
  As a point of comparison, the Dedibox Extreme SP launched in 2013 and has 1TB of RAM and costs €1899.99/month. http://documentation.online.net/en/serveur-dedie/offres/serveur-dedibox-extreme-sp/server-extreme-sp http://documentation.online.net/en/serveur-dedie/offres/serv...
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Physical servers at other providers are almost universally cheaper than AWS. At AWS, you're paying for it to be in your same account, have access to your other AWS resources, etc. EDIT: This is not to hate on AWS. I love AWS! (I do devops and infrastructure). Its to say, if you need what AWS offers, buy it. If you don't, architect your solution around other providers.
    - motoboi 11y ago
      Don't forget the insanely good availability, and the low level management AWS guys do for you.

trjordan 11y ago

I know it's happening, but I'm so surprised to see them cater to technologies like SAP HANA. 3 years ago, there was basically no overlap between people who wanted to run products from SAP/Oracle and people who influenced product offerings from AWS. Obviously, that's different today.

AndyNemmity 11y ago
Yeah, I run HANA nodes on AWS, but they are all the small variety. This release will allow the real stuff to run on it, super excited.
edwinnathaniel 11y ago
hi @trjordan, long time no hear ;) It's amazing to see the progress from anti-cloud (or private-cloud) to "we're cloud only" within that timeframe (I'm referring to companies that was hard-on on-premise). AFAIK, SAP HANA is being used by NBA (NBA.com/Stats), NFL, NHL (http://www.nhl.com/ice/news.htm?id=754248 http://www.nhl.com/ice/news.htm?id=754248) to provide real time statistics for the whole league. I wonder if they want to move their infrastructure to AWS. PS: I work for SAP
- AndyNemmity 11y ago
  I know way too much about this to respond, but I'll just say there are a lot of pieces driving this. :)
  - edwinnathaniel 11y ago
    Send me an email :D, would love to hear the story.
- trjordan 11y ago
  Haha, hey, good to hear from you! My take is that people are doing it piecemeal. The datacenter guys got a mandate to make everything cloudy because of the obvious benefits (scale, provisioning time, lower TCO), but the data / application teams had already invested in something like HANA. If you can just forklift everything up to the cloud, there's at least the theory that you can start to peel off bits as they need to and integrate further with Amazon. If you're starting a streaming ingest process, it's appealing to forklift your existing batch ingest, then use Amazon's services to build the new one. Similar with DB upgrades (RDS), backups (S3 / glacier), or anything else that has a dedicated service. But the first thing to do is get the core application running so you're not trying to patch around some unholy hybrid cloud mess.

nabaraz 11y ago

Hacker news has become AWS news lately. In serious note, I am curious to see pricing structure on X1.

ShaneOG 11y ago
AWS re:Invent[0] is taking place this week, so there are a lot of news and announcements. [0] https://reinvent.awsevents.com/ https://reinvent.awsevents.com/
rubiquity 11y ago
AWS re:Invent is happening right now which is their big announcement of all sorts of goodies.
seanwilson 11y ago
It's because the AWS re:Invent event is on at the moment so there's lots of announcements.

AndyNemmity 11y ago

It'll be nice, I'm in the middle of building a 14 node HANA cluster, and it would be much easier to just have it all on AWS provided I get the same performance. edit: let alone the fact I could take it down when not in use. That's a ridiculously cool thought. the price of this thing all together is insane.

jewel 11y ago

2TB of RAM would cost $31k or so when built out of 32GB chips. I don't know if EC2 is done this way, but imagine if the T2.micro class was running on these servers (to save physical footprint). At 1.3¢ per hour, the server would bring in $227k/year.

garyrichardson 11y ago

"640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates, 1981 I can't wait to spin up a 64 node cluster of these new X1's.

strictnein 11y ago
> "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time … I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640 K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again." - Bill Gates, 1996 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed

anacleto 11y ago

I've been through this use-case, AWS re:Invent 2015 – Netflix and AWS http://cloudacademy.com/blog/aws-reinvent-netflix/ http://cloudacademy.com/blog/aws-reinvent-netflix/

nivertech 11y ago

My speculation is that X1 instances is where Amazon QuickSight in-memory BI service is running.