11 ms·

EC2 Dedicated Hosts

176 points by jeffbarr 11y ago

jwrigh13 11y ago
Now how long will it take for Amazon to release a dedicated host marketplace where you can sell unused space on your dedicated hosts?
- dandroid1 11y ago
  Doesn't that defeat the purpose of obtaining a dedicated host?
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Technically, its the equivalent of a leaseback. It may make sense depending on the profitability of the arbitrage you're targeting.
  - nandhp 11y ago
    Not if it's primarily to accommodate bring-your-own-license for per-machine-licensed software. Needing to have control over what machine runs your instances doesn't mean you can't allow other people to run their instances on "your" hardware.
- andrewguenther 11y ago
  Ah yes, we run all of our services on dedicated NSA machines we leased from AWS! This would be a security and privacy nightmare.
- nandhp 11y ago
  This isn't too far-fetched -- there's already a marketplace for buying and selling used reserved instances. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-instances/marketplace/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-insta...
nodesocket 11y ago
If you setup a dedicated host, does that also include local SSD disks, or do you have to still use EBS?
- jeffbarr 11y ago
  A Dedicated Host contains EC2 instances. You would still use EBS if you need storage other that what's available on the instances. Per the EC2 Instance Types page (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/), many of the instance types already include SSD storage.
  - nodesocket 11y ago
    Thanks Jeff for the response. Appreciate that you personally respond. Wouldn't dedicated I/O be a big plus and selling point for dedicated instances?
idlewords 11y ago
All the advantages of a dedicated server without the hassle of saving tons of money.
- agopaul 11y ago
  Well, dedicated hardware for EC2 makes sense for certain workloads (eg when you need more predictable performance), considering that you can use them alongside other AWS services (EBS, RDS, Route 53, S3, etc). Plus allocating 'bare metal' VMs on demand via script/API is a big plus. It would be interesting to see how much you can squeeze the dedicated hardware with the largest EC2 types though.
  - bkeroack 11y ago
    This is very far from 'bare metal'.
- jeffbarr 11y ago
  Many of our customers have asked for this feature so that they can run software that is licensed for a particular piece of actual hardware.
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    To think of it another way, smaller companies might save money by buying bare metal and renting colo space. But larger companies would spend more just managing the separate bill for the colo, not to mention the logistics of another datacenter.
    - iofj 11y ago
      Given that there is a 10x price difference in some cases, I would doubt this. The bigger a company is, the more sense colo or dedicated makes. You don't have to manage a datacenter just because you don't go for Amazon. There's tons of companies that will do it for you, at various levels. You want colo space, nothing more ? Fine. You want dedi hosts with a few of your own machines in between ? No problems. On top of that, a lot of dedicated server companies will have spare instance so spinning up new devices is certainly easy enough. Feel free to contact me if you need solutions like this. I think there's one huge advantage of Amazon : management effectively doesn't get to set policy on the datacenter, so they don't get to screw it up. An internal company department would use something like VMWare and won't let you spin something up without endless approvals, whereas Amazon treats you like a customer.
andrewstuart2 11y ago
Man, I'd really like to just see bare metal from them. To me that was part of the allure of containers -- so much more efficient than multiple VMs and yet you get a lot of similar benefits, as long as you don't mind some security tradeoffs. Running ECS is cool and all, and I know they do some container-specific VM optimizations, but I still know I'm running a kernel on a kernel, even if my VMs happen to share a host. I'd love seeing the flexibility of the ECS software, but on metal.
- gtaylor 11y ago
  Agreed. But maybe that's a later step in the roadmap. Let's hope!
- omarforgotpwd 11y ago
  I'm sure Amazon would love it too (think about how much money they could save / make) but there are a lot of security concerns that need to be addressed. Running code in a virtualized kernel is a lot more secure than running in the real kernel with permissions limited. Theoretically an exploit could allow someone to take over the machine, whereas if the machine is virtualized it's much harder to take over the host.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Doesn't matter if the machine is taken over if its properly contained at the network level. Dedicated server hosting companies have been doing this for years.
    - skj 11y ago
      With VMs the customer can share a physical host with others and not have security concerns. This cohosting lets aws pack customers more efficiently and have much better margins for the same quality service. With containers on bare metal, they could not cohost customers.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
notnarb 11y ago
To save a trip to the calculator: $2.341 (m3 host / hour) * 24 hours * 30 days = $1685.52 before the "up to 70%" reservation discount.
- shawabawa3 11y ago
  Bare in mind that can run up to 32 m3 instances
  - fidget 11y ago
    Which would be `$0.067 * 32 * 24 * 30 = $1543.68` on demand
jagger27 11y ago
So this is for IO- and CPU-bound users who for some reason are also EC2-bound.
- mikey_p 11y ago
  According to their docs/examples, this is mostly for legal reasons. i.e. some software can be licensed to multiple VMs if they are all running on the same host.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
20years 11y ago
Can anyone give me the advantages of choosing an EC2 dedicated host over going with a true dedicated server?
- MBCook 11y ago
  All the rest of your infrastructure is in AWS and you want the high interconnect speeds.
  - wmf 11y ago
    This shouldn't be any faster than normal EC2. (Edit: I may have misunderstood the comment. This will certainly have a faster interconnect to EC2 compared to a non-EC2 dedicated server.)
    - nickodell 11y ago
      Higher relative to getting a dedicated server from a different provider.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      No, but if you need a dedicated server in addition to other EC2 hosts it will certainly be faster to be in a AWS data center.
  - zaroth 11y ago
    If it was just about network speed, it would be cheaper to get the direct 10G cross-connection to Amazon's network than to pay the premium for the dedicated hardware.
- idlewords 11y ago
  You want decent performance but your budgeting process only allows you to use AWS.
- api 11y ago
  It's called Amazon. Other cloud services and bare metal hosts are not called Amazon.
knite 11y ago
What's the networking model? Will two instances on the same host talk over the datacenter network, or will the traffic stay local to the machine?
- mentat 11y ago
  Given placement groups I'd expect 10 GB local networking as this is the same thing.
ludbb 11y ago
Are the hardware specs available somewhere? Is it possible I'm confusing this with an interface for launching EC2 instances at a premium disguised as being actual dedicated hardware?
- jeffbarr 11y ago
  Each Dedicated Host is home to a specific number of EC2 instances. Check out the EC2 instance types (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) to learn more.
fideloper 11y ago
Some pro/cons that would be interesting to discuss: Other than licensing, an advantage I'm guessing is in reducing noisy neighbor affects. In our case, we use a lot of t2.micro instances, which seem to suffer from this. A disadvantage is that the instances within a dedicated host might all go down together? (similar to if you put all your instances in us-east-1e and 1e goes down?, or of course if all of us-east goes down). Although I'm not sure a dedicated host itself is more likely to go down, while a datacenter remains operational. That's what I'm most interested in knowing - how do these fail?
- jeffbarr 11y ago
  We monitor the health of the host; take a look at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicated-hosts-monitoring.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicated... to learn more.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  You have to consider it a SPOF. Put nothing on the same dedicated host that you cannot fail at the same time. Though in AWS speak, generally you treat an availability zone as a SPOF... so dedicated host is of course a SPOF...
grubles 11y ago
So, how much different is this than Vultr's[0] offering? [0]https://www.vultr.com/pricing/dedicatedcloud/ https://www.vultr.com/pricing/dedicatedcloud/
yaniksilver 11y ago
How is this different from Cloudways Amazon offering? http://www.cloudways.com/en/amazon-cloud-hosting.php http://www.cloudways.com/en/amazon-cloud-hosting.php
- dylz 11y ago
  For one thing, Amazon isn't spamming the crap out of multiple forums (Webhostingtalk, Lowendtalk, ...) with fake shill reviews. And you not disclosing your connection considering 90% of your submission history is cloudways makes it even better. And that you're one of the fake-review-shill spammers too.[0] [0] http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/65774/is-there-any-service-providing-managed-vultr-servers http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/65774/is-there-any-serv...
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  As far as I can tell that offering has basically nothing to do with dedicated hosts.
allendoerfer 11y ago
Thanks to the amazing innovation at Amazon, 2016 will be the year, we can finally have a real computer in a datacenter, where we can run all our JavaScript code on, instead of of having to use an anonymous cloud service.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  This isn't even bare metal. This is just pinning or affinity. (Pinning, or affinity, depending on host failure mode - do they failover to a new host, and do they all get to be on the same host again?) Sure, your jobs aren't fighting another customer's jobs for CPU; now you're fighting your own jobs for CPU.
- ycosynot 11y ago
  Maybe we could distribute the computing on these dedicated hosts, to have like, virtual dedicated hosts. And then run them from Minecraft... It's the future.
  - therein 11y ago
    You can implement the HTTP parse logic in Minecraft using redstone. Deploy nginx or Apache Traffic Server in front of your Minecraft and you are good.
nowarninglabel 11y ago
No one's mentioned this as a potential use case, so wondering if other people have a way to solve a problem I have...we spin up EC2 instances on the fly for running tests, but some of those require a dedicated IP address to deal with a vendor integration. Seems like a dedicated host might solve that, though perhaps not worth the cost. Is there some other way people solve this problem? We currently have an in-house box just for running those IP limited tests.
- nathancahill 11y ago
  Elastic IPs?
- jeremyjh 11y ago
  Yes - its called Elastic IP. You can have a dedicated IP address and associate it on-the-fly to regular EC2 instances. You pay a small monthly fee if you are not actively using it. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-ip-addresses-eip.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-i...
  - nowarninglabel 11y ago
    The problem with Elastic IP, from my understanding, was that I often need to spin up say a dozen instances for a short period of time, but otherwise don't need the IPs, so it seemed it would end up costing to have those all available but only temporarily in use...though adding up the cost, it'd only be $45 a month (12 * 0.005 * 24 * 30) so perhaps that's not a big deal.
- vacri 11y ago
  Apart from the elastic IPs already mentioned, two more options: 1) Have a canned VPC-based test server that's off, and only turned on for the test. VPC-based servers do not lose their IP addresses between activations (though a single server may not suit you) 2) Use AWS internal DNS - have your vendor product use hostnames rather than IPs (if possible), and when you spin up the new machine for testing, switch it's IP into the hostname on the internal DNS zone. Again, you'll need to be VPC-based to use this. You can destroy the instance between runs with this method.
abrookewood 11y ago
How exactly is this different from Dedicated Instances (which have been around for years)? "Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that run on single-tenant hardware dedicated to a single customer. They are ideal for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations require that your EC2 instances be physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that belong to other customers. Dedicated Instances let you take full advantage of the benefits of the AWS cloud – on-demand elastic provisioning, pay only for what you use, all while ensuring that your Amazon EC2 compute instances are isolated at the hardware level."
- abrookewood 11y ago
  I'm guessing it's simply that you know exactly which hosts you are running on, which would solve the licensing issue mentioned below. Any other reasons/benefits?
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  This basically lets you have an entire machine dedicated to a specific type of VM instance, plus have the underlying hardware information, to ease licensing requirements that certain programs and operating systems have. So you can get a box of m4.larges and know exactly what programs are running on it; for example, RedHat offers per-vm server licensing, so running 20 instances on RHEL on your dedicated box just costs you the flat rate VM host cost.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  It probably allows you to run your Oracle workloads.
boulos 11y ago
Interesting: > each Dedicated Host can accommodate one or more instances of a particular type, all of which must be the same size I'm surprised by the "same size" requirement. It seems like even if you ask customers to stay within a single family (m3, m4, etc.) the customer could do their own hand placement of 8 vCPUs next to a pair of 4s... Edit: Disclaimer, I work on Compute Engine.
- duskwuff 11y ago
  Is it possible that's been going on the whole time? Allowing different flavors of guests to cohabitate has few benefits (at their scale) and many drawbacks; I wouldn't be surprised if they simply never allowed it.
- mentat 11y ago
  It probably simplifying the fitting if they just line up a Host targeted request with a dedicated host of that type.
wildparrot 11y ago
Sadly there is still no IPV6 support...
- lwhalen 11y ago
  This should be higher up. It's time for end-to-end IPv6 functionality on all major service providers and applications.
triggercut 11y ago
This is great for (warning: potentially limited use case ahead) engineering companies* who run large analysis clusters for specialty Simulation/CFD software. Especially those frustrated by their vendors current or (non-existent) cloud processing offerings. A lot of software in this space, for instance, has a fixed MAC address requirement for their license servers, and you report/pay depending on the number of cores. Whilst you can get around that sometimes, it would certainly void agreements and wouldn't hold up in an audit. In some companies I've worked, this could drastically reduce the capital costs for engineers needing overpowered workstations that are analogous to Ferraris you only take out on weekends. *who are already using AWS in other parts of their infrastructure.
- motoboi 11y ago
  Other place where this is great is enterprise cloud migration and hybrid cloud formation. When one decides to go cloud, you need to throw away you prior investment in SO licenses and hardware. Although you have no alternative but throw away hardware, being able to reuse investment in software greatly reduce migration costs. Of course one can just wait until all his licenses expire and then migrate, but such a hard migration would increase risks. And of course it would be nice to have a price comparison between running normal instances and using a dedicated host with my own licenses, but without deeper inspection, dedicated is cheaper.
- laurencerowe 11y ago
  Wouldn't you still see a virtualized network interface with random MAC address from the VM within the dedicated host where the software is running? You could configure an Elastic Network Interface to have a fixed MAC address, but that would also work without dedicated hosts.
imaginenore 11y ago
That pricing is ridiculous though. I can get 15 Hetzner servers for the price of one EC2.
- bdcravens 11y ago
  It's more than a bare metal server - you're still running EC2 instances atop of it, except only your instances are running on that server. Looking at the price of the underlying instances if you run it fully loaded, it seems pretty comparable running those instances non-dedicated.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - imaginenore 11y ago
    So? It's still ridiculously expensive.
jorangreef 11y ago
I have been with Hetzner since 1999, and I have hosted with AWS for 2 or 3 years, before moving back to Hetzner, and I keep wondering when AWS will have anything to match Hetzner's price/performance. Someone from AWS proactively called me up out of the blue the other day to ask for input and to interview me about what I need, and offered to quote. I received a phone call or two and two emails and after mentioning the exact specs and price I get from Hetzner, and being genuinely interested in perhaps getting a competitive quote, I waited and received no reply for some time and then the following: "I'm sorry for my late response. I’ve been pretty busy these days…" "I had a look at what your technical specifications below and I'd like to understand a bit more what type of business you're doing." "One of AWS's main strengths lies in the scalability of our platform." "How much is the % of usage of your dedicated server? What happens if it reaches the maximum usage? At AWS, you can start with smaller instances and use auto-scaling to scale up or down automatically according to your traffic." "Is scalability a challenge for you?" There was no quote attached. :) Hetzner's price/performance is an elephant in the room it seems.
- Slartie 11y ago
  Hehe, I've been using different European-based dedicated server providers (including Hetzner, but also server4you, OVH, Strato) for 10-15 years as well, with varying numbers of servers. All of this happened during the cloud revolution, and I've always been wondering "why would anybody pay these outrageous AWS prices?" - after all, the much-hyped scalability quickly becomes much less relevant if you can practically get 5x-10x the power and traffic in the form of dedicated servers at the same cost, plus the capability of quickly ordering a few more servers (which are automatically allocated to you from a pool of ready-to-use servers, this has been standard practice at dedicated hosting providers for quite some time now) and have them installed in a matter of minutes (provided you've automated your setup process). Sure, you'll have a harder time to get rid of the additional servers, since rentals are typically on a monthly basis, but - did I mention that you'll start with 5x-10x the power anyway, which greatly reduces the need for quick up/downscaling? Aside from huge customers like Dropbox, which most likely get deep discounts on AWS, I don't see who else could get a better deal out of AWS (or any similar cloud provider) than they would get by directly renting dedicated servers, even considering the much-hyped scalability factor (which most customers probably don't ever end up needing anyway, because...let's face it, there's just so much attention going around on the net, which means there can be just a very limited number of things that "go viral", while there are many, many more services competing for said attention out there). That's at least true for the European market. AFAIK, the US hosting market is a bit different and generally more expensive, so AWS might have a better price point with regard to the competition there.

176 points by jeffbarr 11y ago

Now how long will it take for Amazon to release a dedicated host marketplace where you can sell unused space on your dedicated hosts?

dandroid1 11y ago
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of obtaining a dedicated host?
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Technically, its the equivalent of a leaseback. It may make sense depending on the profitability of the arbitrage you're targeting.
- nandhp 11y ago
  Not if it's primarily to accommodate bring-your-own-license for per-machine-licensed software. Needing to have control over what machine runs your instances doesn't mean you can't allow other people to run their instances on "your" hardware.
andrewguenther 11y ago
Ah yes, we run all of our services on dedicated NSA machines we leased from AWS! This would be a security and privacy nightmare.
nandhp 11y ago
This isn't too far-fetched -- there's already a marketplace for buying and selling used reserved instances. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-instances/marketplace/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-insta...

nodesocket 11y ago

If you setup a dedicated host, does that also include local SSD disks, or do you have to still use EBS?

jeffbarr 11y ago
A Dedicated Host contains EC2 instances. You would still use EBS if you need storage other that what's available on the instances. Per the EC2 Instance Types page (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/), many of the instance types already include SSD storage.
- nodesocket 11y ago
  Thanks Jeff for the response. Appreciate that you personally respond. Wouldn't dedicated I/O be a big plus and selling point for dedicated instances?

idlewords 11y ago

All the advantages of a dedicated server without the hassle of saving tons of money.

agopaul 11y ago
Well, dedicated hardware for EC2 makes sense for certain workloads (eg when you need more predictable performance), considering that you can use them alongside other AWS services (EBS, RDS, Route 53, S3, etc). Plus allocating 'bare metal' VMs on demand via script/API is a big plus. It would be interesting to see how much you can squeeze the dedicated hardware with the largest EC2 types though.
- bkeroack 11y ago
  This is very far from 'bare metal'.
jeffbarr 11y ago
Many of our customers have asked for this feature so that they can run software that is licensed for a particular piece of actual hardware.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  To think of it another way, smaller companies might save money by buying bare metal and renting colo space. But larger companies would spend more just managing the separate bill for the colo, not to mention the logistics of another datacenter.
  - iofj 11y ago
    Given that there is a 10x price difference in some cases, I would doubt this. The bigger a company is, the more sense colo or dedicated makes. You don't have to manage a datacenter just because you don't go for Amazon. There's tons of companies that will do it for you, at various levels. You want colo space, nothing more ? Fine. You want dedi hosts with a few of your own machines in between ? No problems. On top of that, a lot of dedicated server companies will have spare instance so spinning up new devices is certainly easy enough. Feel free to contact me if you need solutions like this. I think there's one huge advantage of Amazon : management effectively doesn't get to set policy on the datacenter, so they don't get to screw it up. An internal company department would use something like VMWare and won't let you spin something up without endless approvals, whereas Amazon treats you like a customer.

andrewstuart2 11y ago

Man, I'd really like to just see bare metal from them. To me that was part of the allure of containers -- so much more efficient than multiple VMs and yet you get a lot of similar benefits, as long as you don't mind some security tradeoffs. Running ECS is cool and all, and I know they do some container-specific VM optimizations, but I still know I'm running a kernel on a kernel, even if my VMs happen to share a host. I'd love seeing the flexibility of the ECS software, but on metal.

gtaylor 11y ago
Agreed. But maybe that's a later step in the roadmap. Let's hope!
omarforgotpwd 11y ago
I'm sure Amazon would love it too (think about how much money they could save / make) but there are a lot of security concerns that need to be addressed. Running code in a virtualized kernel is a lot more secure than running in the real kernel with permissions limited. Theoretically an exploit could allow someone to take over the machine, whereas if the machine is virtualized it's much harder to take over the host.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Doesn't matter if the machine is taken over if its properly contained at the network level. Dedicated server hosting companies have been doing this for years.
  - skj 11y ago
    With VMs the customer can share a physical host with others and not have security concerns. This cohosting lets aws pack customers more efficiently and have much better margins for the same quality service. With containers on bare metal, they could not cohost customers.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago

notnarb 11y ago

To save a trip to the calculator: $2.341 (m3 host / hour) * 24 hours * 30 days = $1685.52 before the "up to 70%" reservation discount.

shawabawa3 11y ago
Bare in mind that can run up to 32 m3 instances
- fidget 11y ago
  Which would be `$0.067 * 32 * 24 * 30 = $1543.68` on demand

jagger27 11y ago

So this is for IO- and CPU-bound users who for some reason are also EC2-bound.

mikey_p 11y ago
According to their docs/examples, this is mostly for legal reasons. i.e. some software can be licensed to multiple VMs if they are all running on the same host.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

20years 11y ago

Can anyone give me the advantages of choosing an EC2 dedicated host over going with a true dedicated server?

MBCook 11y ago
All the rest of your infrastructure is in AWS and you want the high interconnect speeds.
- wmf 11y ago
  This shouldn't be any faster than normal EC2. (Edit: I may have misunderstood the comment. This will certainly have a faster interconnect to EC2 compared to a non-EC2 dedicated server.)
  - nickodell 11y ago
    Higher relative to getting a dedicated server from a different provider.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    No, but if you need a dedicated server in addition to other EC2 hosts it will certainly be faster to be in a AWS data center.
- zaroth 11y ago
  If it was just about network speed, it would be cheaper to get the direct 10G cross-connection to Amazon's network than to pay the premium for the dedicated hardware.
idlewords 11y ago
You want decent performance but your budgeting process only allows you to use AWS.
api 11y ago
It's called Amazon. Other cloud services and bare metal hosts are not called Amazon.

knite 11y ago

What's the networking model? Will two instances on the same host talk over the datacenter network, or will the traffic stay local to the machine?

mentat 11y ago
Given placement groups I'd expect 10 GB local networking as this is the same thing.

ludbb 11y ago

Are the hardware specs available somewhere? Is it possible I'm confusing this with an interface for launching EC2 instances at a premium disguised as being actual dedicated hardware?

jeffbarr 11y ago
Each Dedicated Host is home to a specific number of EC2 instances. Check out the EC2 instance types (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) to learn more.

fideloper 11y ago

Some pro/cons that would be interesting to discuss: Other than licensing, an advantage I'm guessing is in reducing noisy neighbor affects. In our case, we use a lot of t2.micro instances, which seem to suffer from this. A disadvantage is that the instances within a dedicated host might all go down together? (similar to if you put all your instances in us-east-1e and 1e goes down?, or of course if all of us-east goes down). Although I'm not sure a dedicated host itself is more likely to go down, while a datacenter remains operational. That's what I'm most interested in knowing - how do these fail?

jeffbarr 11y ago
We monitor the health of the host; take a look at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicated-hosts-monitoring.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicated... to learn more.
brianwawok 11y ago
You have to consider it a SPOF. Put nothing on the same dedicated host that you cannot fail at the same time. Though in AWS speak, generally you treat an availability zone as a SPOF... so dedicated host is of course a SPOF...

grubles 11y ago

So, how much different is this than Vultr's[0] offering? [0]https://www.vultr.com/pricing/dedicatedcloud/ https://www.vultr.com/pricing/dedicatedcloud/

yaniksilver 11y ago

How is this different from Cloudways Amazon offering? http://www.cloudways.com/en/amazon-cloud-hosting.php http://www.cloudways.com/en/amazon-cloud-hosting.php

dylz 11y ago
For one thing, Amazon isn't spamming the crap out of multiple forums (Webhostingtalk, Lowendtalk, ...) with fake shill reviews. And you not disclosing your connection considering 90% of your submission history is cloudways makes it even better. And that you're one of the fake-review-shill spammers too.[0] [0] http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/65774/is-there-any-service-providing-managed-vultr-servers http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/65774/is-there-any-serv...
ceejayoz 11y ago
As far as I can tell that offering has basically nothing to do with dedicated hosts.

allendoerfer 11y ago

Thanks to the amazing innovation at Amazon, 2016 will be the year, we can finally have a real computer in a datacenter, where we can run all our JavaScript code on, instead of of having to use an anonymous cloud service.

stephengillie 11y ago
This isn't even bare metal. This is just pinning or affinity. (Pinning, or affinity, depending on host failure mode - do they failover to a new host, and do they all get to be on the same host again?) Sure, your jobs aren't fighting another customer's jobs for CPU; now you're fighting your own jobs for CPU.
ycosynot 11y ago
Maybe we could distribute the computing on these dedicated hosts, to have like, virtual dedicated hosts. And then run them from Minecraft... It's the future.
- therein 11y ago
  You can implement the HTTP parse logic in Minecraft using redstone. Deploy nginx or Apache Traffic Server in front of your Minecraft and you are good.

nowarninglabel 11y ago

No one's mentioned this as a potential use case, so wondering if other people have a way to solve a problem I have...we spin up EC2 instances on the fly for running tests, but some of those require a dedicated IP address to deal with a vendor integration. Seems like a dedicated host might solve that, though perhaps not worth the cost. Is there some other way people solve this problem? We currently have an in-house box just for running those IP limited tests.

nathancahill 11y ago
Elastic IPs?
jeremyjh 11y ago
Yes - its called Elastic IP. You can have a dedicated IP address and associate it on-the-fly to regular EC2 instances. You pay a small monthly fee if you are not actively using it. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-ip-addresses-eip.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-i...
- nowarninglabel 11y ago
  The problem with Elastic IP, from my understanding, was that I often need to spin up say a dozen instances for a short period of time, but otherwise don't need the IPs, so it seemed it would end up costing to have those all available but only temporarily in use...though adding up the cost, it'd only be $45 a month (12 * 0.005 * 24 * 30) so perhaps that's not a big deal.
vacri 11y ago
Apart from the elastic IPs already mentioned, two more options: 1) Have a canned VPC-based test server that's off, and only turned on for the test. VPC-based servers do not lose their IP addresses between activations (though a single server may not suit you) 2) Use AWS internal DNS - have your vendor product use hostnames rather than IPs (if possible), and when you spin up the new machine for testing, switch it's IP into the hostname on the internal DNS zone. Again, you'll need to be VPC-based to use this. You can destroy the instance between runs with this method.

abrookewood 11y ago

How exactly is this different from Dedicated Instances (which have been around for years)? "Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that run on single-tenant hardware dedicated to a single customer. They are ideal for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations require that your EC2 instances be physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that belong to other customers. Dedicated Instances let you take full advantage of the benefits of the AWS cloud – on-demand elastic provisioning, pay only for what you use, all while ensuring that your Amazon EC2 compute instances are isolated at the hardware level."

abrookewood 11y ago
I'm guessing it's simply that you know exactly which hosts you are running on, which would solve the licensing issue mentioned below. Any other reasons/benefits?
Sanddancer 11y ago
This basically lets you have an entire machine dedicated to a specific type of VM instance, plus have the underlying hardware information, to ease licensing requirements that certain programs and operating systems have. So you can get a box of m4.larges and know exactly what programs are running on it; for example, RedHat offers per-vm server licensing, so running 20 instances on RHEL on your dedicated box just costs you the flat rate VM host cost.
Spooky23 11y ago
It probably allows you to run your Oracle workloads.

boulos 11y ago

Interesting: > each Dedicated Host can accommodate one or more instances of a particular type, all of which must be the same size I'm surprised by the "same size" requirement. It seems like even if you ask customers to stay within a single family (m3, m4, etc.) the customer could do their own hand placement of 8 vCPUs next to a pair of 4s... Edit: Disclaimer, I work on Compute Engine.

duskwuff 11y ago
Is it possible that's been going on the whole time? Allowing different flavors of guests to cohabitate has few benefits (at their scale) and many drawbacks; I wouldn't be surprised if they simply never allowed it.
mentat 11y ago
It probably simplifying the fitting if they just line up a Host targeted request with a dedicated host of that type.

wildparrot 11y ago

Sadly there is still no IPV6 support...

lwhalen 11y ago
This should be higher up. It's time for end-to-end IPv6 functionality on all major service providers and applications.

triggercut 11y ago

This is great for (warning: potentially limited use case ahead) engineering companies* who run large analysis clusters for specialty Simulation/CFD software. Especially those frustrated by their vendors current or (non-existent) cloud processing offerings. A lot of software in this space, for instance, has a fixed MAC address requirement for their license servers, and you report/pay depending on the number of cores. Whilst you can get around that sometimes, it would certainly void agreements and wouldn't hold up in an audit. In some companies I've worked, this could drastically reduce the capital costs for engineers needing overpowered workstations that are analogous to Ferraris you only take out on weekends. *who are already using AWS in other parts of their infrastructure.

motoboi 11y ago
Other place where this is great is enterprise cloud migration and hybrid cloud formation. When one decides to go cloud, you need to throw away you prior investment in SO licenses and hardware. Although you have no alternative but throw away hardware, being able to reuse investment in software greatly reduce migration costs. Of course one can just wait until all his licenses expire and then migrate, but such a hard migration would increase risks. And of course it would be nice to have a price comparison between running normal instances and using a dedicated host with my own licenses, but without deeper inspection, dedicated is cheaper.
laurencerowe 11y ago
Wouldn't you still see a virtualized network interface with random MAC address from the VM within the dedicated host where the software is running? You could configure an Elastic Network Interface to have a fixed MAC address, but that would also work without dedicated hosts.

imaginenore 11y ago

That pricing is ridiculous though. I can get 15 Hetzner servers for the price of one EC2.

bdcravens 11y ago
It's more than a bare metal server - you're still running EC2 instances atop of it, except only your instances are running on that server. Looking at the price of the underlying instances if you run it fully loaded, it seems pretty comparable running those instances non-dedicated.
- deleted 11y ago
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- imaginenore 11y ago
  So? It's still ridiculously expensive.

jorangreef 11y ago

I have been with Hetzner since 1999, and I have hosted with AWS for 2 or 3 years, before moving back to Hetzner, and I keep wondering when AWS will have anything to match Hetzner's price/performance. Someone from AWS proactively called me up out of the blue the other day to ask for input and to interview me about what I need, and offered to quote. I received a phone call or two and two emails and after mentioning the exact specs and price I get from Hetzner, and being genuinely interested in perhaps getting a competitive quote, I waited and received no reply for some time and then the following: "I'm sorry for my late response. I’ve been pretty busy these days…" "I had a look at what your technical specifications below and I'd like to understand a bit more what type of business you're doing." "One of AWS's main strengths lies in the scalability of our platform." "How much is the % of usage of your dedicated server? What happens if it reaches the maximum usage? At AWS, you can start with smaller instances and use auto-scaling to scale up or down automatically according to your traffic." "Is scalability a challenge for you?" There was no quote attached. :) Hetzner's price/performance is an elephant in the room it seems.

Slartie 11y ago
Hehe, I've been using different European-based dedicated server providers (including Hetzner, but also server4you, OVH, Strato) for 10-15 years as well, with varying numbers of servers. All of this happened during the cloud revolution, and I've always been wondering "why would anybody pay these outrageous AWS prices?" - after all, the much-hyped scalability quickly becomes much less relevant if you can practically get 5x-10x the power and traffic in the form of dedicated servers at the same cost, plus the capability of quickly ordering a few more servers (which are automatically allocated to you from a pool of ready-to-use servers, this has been standard practice at dedicated hosting providers for quite some time now) and have them installed in a matter of minutes (provided you've automated your setup process). Sure, you'll have a harder time to get rid of the additional servers, since rentals are typically on a monthly basis, but - did I mention that you'll start with 5x-10x the power anyway, which greatly reduces the need for quick up/downscaling? Aside from huge customers like Dropbox, which most likely get deep discounts on AWS, I don't see who else could get a better deal out of AWS (or any similar cloud provider) than they would get by directly renting dedicated servers, even considering the much-hyped scalability factor (which most customers probably don't ever end up needing anyway, because...let's face it, there's just so much attention going around on the net, which means there can be just a very limited number of things that "go viral", while there are many, many more services competing for said attention out there). That's at least true for the European market. AFAIK, the US hosting market is a bit different and generally more expensive, so AWS might have a better price point with regard to the competition there.