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Full disclosure: I work for Linode and I am super biased. This is my own opinion etc etc Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even bef

Full disclosure: I work for Linode and I am super biased. This is my own opinion etc etc Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even before I started at Linode, I thought it was terrible. It's extremely, unreasonably pricey. The UI is terrible. Their offerings are availble elsewhere. I started MediaCrush, a now-defunct media hosting website, on AWS. After a while, we switched to dedicated hosting (really sexy servers). We were looking at $250 a month and scaled up to millions of visitors per day! I ran our bandwidth and CPU usage and such numbers through the AWS price calculator a while ago - over $20,000 per month. AWS is a racket. It seems to me like the easiest way to burn through your new startup's seed money real fast. Edit: not trying to sell you on Linode, just disclosing that I work there. There are lots of options, just do the research before you reach for AWS.

JabavuAdams 11y ago
As an AMZN shareholder, I encourage you to please use AWS. That is all.
tshtf 11y ago
In the past during security incidents (and there have been more three than major ones in as many years), there has been absolutely no transparency from Linode management. That's more than enough reason for serious customers to avoid Linode...
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
  I don't think it's appropriate for me to comment on security incidents (before my time, anyway), but I'm not trying to sell people on Linode here. MediaCrush was actually using a combination of Voxility and Digital Ocean (and Route 53, actually). There are lots of options, guys.
- seany 11y ago
  I was going to say the same thing. The amount of transparency in general from aws is DRAMATICALLY better than linode.
CharlesW 11y ago
I feel like you wouldn't be too pleased if a super-biased Amazon employee posted a similarly anecdata-filled post about Linode. Is it really a smart idea to bad-mouth AWS in a post that really doesn't intersect with what Linode provides in any substantive way?
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  Considering he put the disclaimer that he is super-biased up front, I personally appreciate the insider review
cle 11y ago
There's a lot more that goes into the decision than service costs. There are lots of other costs that must be considered. E.g. if using AWS can save you one employee, that alone might make it worth the extra service costs. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your analysis is incomplete.
- late2part 11y ago
  I'm sure there's a situation where AWS saves money on TCO. If you ever find it, please let us know.
  - discodave 11y ago
    Umm, does linode offer higher level services like SQS, Lambda, SWF and friends?
    - aeze 11y ago
      Their open source alternatives running on Linux?
      - stouset 11y ago
        Because ops is free.
      - discodave 11y ago
        + the cost of paying people to setup, deploy & manage these these things.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
busterarm 11y ago
AWS hands out credits like candy and there's tons of ways to get AWS credit or earn it. I wouldn't be surprised if cash-strapped startups built on AWS credit to go out and get funding and then just never move off of it.
- late2part 11y ago
  Correct. Lock-in is a key part of their strategy.
larrymcp 11y ago
Hmm. Well, somehow these heavy-hitters have presumably done their research and then chose AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ I see your characterization of AWS above as "terrible", but I'm curious how that squares with the (probably very well-informed) decisions these people made to use AWS.
- jrochkind1 11y ago
  I would not "do my research" on the sales site of one of the vendors, if that's what you're suggesting.
  - zenlikethat 11y ago
    The poster is suggesting that the firms listed on Amazon's page did their research before buying, then settled on AWS and felt strongly enough that it was a good choice to make a public recommendation.
    - jrochkind1 11y ago
      Or got enough of a discount/payment to make a public recommendation in return?
bobbyi_settv 11y ago
Linode offers the equivalent of a tiny, tiny subset of AWS. I haven't looked recently, but do they have something equivalent to SQS? Autoscaling groups? DynamoDB? SES? Cloudwatch? If you are going to end up re-building AWS's services from scratch on top of what are essentially naked linux machines (or doing your integration work between services from many vendors), you are doing a huge amount of work that isn't necessary and will be a lot more expensive than that $20k/ month you could have been paying to Amazon.
- late2part 11y ago
  False. Most AWS services are implementations of open source solutions. Once you implement it yourself on Linux, the ongoing cost drops. With AWS you pay more the larger you get.
  - eva1984 11y ago
    What? Implement RDS/SQS/Redshift myself? That is not easy, believe me.
    - ma2rten 11y ago
      It's not easy, but also not every difficult. The company I work for has two Dev Ops (only one until a year ago) and runs on AWS serving millions of users. We are using MySQL RDS, but are migrating to self-managed Cassandra. We use RabbitMQ instead of SQS. We use Hive/Presto instead of Redshift.
      - eva1984 11y ago
        You sure can adapt the open-sourced solution, though I don't think Cassandra/Presto can match up to what RDS/Redshift can offer. The key point is, running those things yourself, you are likely to lose all the nice failover mechanisms/monitoring/auto-snapshotting stuff that AWS offers. To live up to that, it will require you to not only have extensive understanding of the software you are running, but also a considerable amount of your time will be dedicated to Ops side, which can lead to some really big frustration from time to time. In that sense, I don't think you can re-IMPLEMENT something by assuming too much of comprises.
devonkim 11y ago
Most of the reasons to go with AWS as a major strategic decision are to avoid paying for 3-4 (or perhaps... 40+) ops engineers to run and manage so many things that really don't add much business value in themselves and that you could hold to some form of an SLA (especially with enterprise support accounts) and recoup some costs if things came down to it. Furthermore, engineering a lot of AWS services would cost you developer time as well. I consult / contract for a Fortune 50 customer that pays an insane amount of money to AWS per month and it seems ridiculous what they're paying for and what they get. But do you know what's even more ridiculous? Paying three times as much but getting even worse reliability and a massive amount of time wasted while waiting weeks to provision servers. One group internally used to have massive outages daily resulting in needing to hire a dedicated team of about 6 just to handle that load of production incidents (terrible reliability also resulting in loss of revenue too) and since migrating their software with even the most bone-headed SPF-everywhere AWS based software architecture haven't had more than one or two per week for outages now. The cost benefits get better the more incompetent / incapable your internal IT organization is. The amount of wasted resources due to internal bureaucracy, legacy, and working with companies that don't really practice any form of technology at scale has been an incredible amount of savings for my customer. And knowing how much my customer relies upon AWS support for the most menial of tasks (primarily a cultural thing with how they treat their vendors as well as internal resources) I am sure that nobody but massive companies that deal with external bureaucracies effectively could deliver the size and kind of support team to handle the volume of support requests generated by my customer for the most ridiculous of tasks (I've seen executives file AWS support requests to reboot VMs at 3 am because the bureaucracy is extremely brittle here and reflects into the software systems reliability). We may throw millions / month at AWS, but Amazon has to hire at least a few dozen engineers and several account managers just to handle support alone which I might argue could be a net loss to handle the customer. Most vendors that work with my customer have a very hard time working with them because they approach sourcing quite similar to how Walmart does and abuses them to the point where the vendors abuse their employees.
- late2part 11y ago
  "The cost benefits get better the more incompetent / incapable your internal IT organization is. " Yes. There will always be a less stupid solution out there that is not as bad as the bad solution. Or, you could fix IT. But that takes thought. Easier to give money to a vendor you can blame...?
skwirl 11y ago
This definitely reads like an ad for Linode to me and it really is turning me off from your company. Does the company know you are posting these comments on HN?
- jamestnz 11y ago
  This definitely reads like an ad for Linode to me and it really is turning me off from your company. Does the company know you are posting these comments on HN? Really? I didn't get that at all. What I saw was a post giving negative opinions on various aspects of AWS, and stating that AWS' offerings are available elsewhere. There was an example given, of a previous project where he'd switched away from AWS to dedicated physical servers (at an unnamed provider). There was no suspicious boosterism/puffery in the direction of his own employer, like you generally see when a shill is trying to get away with something. In fact, it seems like the only real mention he made of linode was in the disclosure that he kindly added, pointing out that he worked there and was therefore biased. Most ads don't bother to do that. If this counts as an ad, then by those standards nobody could ever post in any thread covering the industry in which they work.
- skwirl 11y ago
  Things are looking really bad for Linode: http://wptavern.com/linode-confirms-data-security-breach-that-matches-recent-wp-engine-attack http://wptavern.com/linode-confirms-data-security-breach-tha...
imp 11y ago
FWIW, I'm a current Linode customer that will be migrating to AWS soon. I like Linode as a basic provider, but I really need the better features such as ASGs, AMIs, and RDS. That's worth the higher cost per hour for me.
chucky_z 11y ago
I simply don't believe the $250 - $20,000 month comparison. Could you please provide some real-world numbers/hardware/stack information? I just did this migration (non-AWS -> AWS), and we saw a ~20% reduction in monthly prices with 1-year contract at AWS vs. physical hosting (admittedly we were getting terrible pricing with our physical hosts, but still). This will be reduced with the addition of t2.nano servers as we run enough t2.micro instances for little odds and ends that it will put a dent in the bill.
- latch 11y ago
  Your parent is [rightfully] including bandwidth. If he was able to get 1gbps unmetered, then the math is in the right ballpark (that's a huge if though). Still, I agree with the parent's general sentiment re price. The gap used to be much worse, but it's still anywhere from 2x-20x depending on what you're doing. - EC2 prices are simply high and exclude things like bandwidth. - The CPUs are usually 1-3 generations behind (they've gotten better with this). - Virtualization adds overhead (again, this can be very significant if you're doing a lot of system calls) - IO options are significantly worse - Their network connectivity is, at best, average You said it yourself, you're comparing a "terrible" deal to AWS and only saved 20%. Sounds to me like AWS is only 20% better than terrible ;)
  - Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
    This is correct. The biggest cost I saw was bandwidth, followed by cycles on their machines. MediaCrush was a "media hosting website" (see original comment) and as such, used a lot of bandwidth and did a lot of work transcoding things, and had a large storage requirement.
    - wise_young_man 11y ago
      Were you comparing bandwidth/data transfer in your numbers for EC2, S3 or CloudFront?
      - Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
kawsper 11y ago
Hi, first of all, thanks for your comment, and your full-disclosure. I am a happy Linode customer, and I have been using your service since 2010-09-02 (that is the date of the first invoice), but I have a few issues with your product that you might be able to look at. - It is too hard to figure out that you offer hourly billing, I found it by accident, and a year too late. - I tried out your Nodebalancers, as I thought they would be a nice help for my stack, but I ended up building my own Haproxy solution since the performance wasn't good. When I pay for a dedicated loadbalancers, I would expect it to be top-tuned from your side. - Your API is a mess, and so is your documentation. Everything is GET-requests. And creating a new instance, shouldn't take 11 requests, and a dance to set every little detail correctly. And to be fair, your documentation doesn't even document that, this is a subset of what I use: https://gist.github.com/kaspergrubbe/756f0a227db8aeb92818 https://gist.github.com/kaspergrubbe/756f0a227db8aeb92818 I even managed to find some errors in the documentation when I went through it, so it didn't feel very polished or tested, but maybe it isn't used a lot. It also seems strange that to emulate one or two clicks in the interface, needs 11 requests through the API. - Your advanced settings are extremely hard to find, especially "Edit Configuration Profile" and the "Auto-configure Networking" - Elastic IPs. I feel like it should be easier to swap IPs around Linodes, without me using heartbeatd, and some strange configs. This is much easier with Amazon, and one of the reason why I prefer them. - Anycast routing. Linode has several datacenters, it would be awesome if my setup in the US could have the same IP as my setup in the UK, because right now I am doing ugly DNS hacks to send my customers to the closest datacenter. Is this planned? - Lack of an object store, even though I use Linode, I am still using AWS S3, which means added latency, and I have to pay Amazon for outside traffic, you can't even compare with AWS on these things without starting to have these things. Can I setup a Linode through the API with private networking enabled? I am a happy customer, and I loved your KVM upgrade, I love your prices, and I love your service. But it would be nice to see more innovations happening.
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
  Hi there. I wasn't looking to represent Linode tonight (just my personal opinions here), but I'll go ahead and fill you in. I can't say more than "I've made a note" of most of these things, but I wanted to mention that we're looking at overhauling some things that will definitely fix a lot of your gripes. Linode has been around for 13 years now, and a huge part of my job and the reason I was hired is to modernize a lot of the stale parts, including lots of the things that are frustrating you.
fizixer 11y ago
As neither a AWS or Linode customer (but might become one) I have a couple questions: - Can Linode offer short-term compute or memory intensive service? e.g., If I want to consume 100 teraflops 24x7 for about a couple weeks, or maybe 10 teraflops but a terabyte of memory. (Pay-as-you-go, not monthly/yearly subscription) - On top of that, Can I do above with my IPython notebook code, which is already setup (it uses numpy at the backend so python slowdown is not a problem), with a step-by-step process of how to make it run on Linode (without having to install python scientific stack)? These are some of the use cases that I think are getting popular these days, and for which AWS is known for, e.g., in the areas of machine learning, 3D rendering, etc.
- late2part 11y ago
  Good luck trying to get huge capacity from AWS with no history. Their service limits start low and ratchet slowly, if they have the capacity to give. All these features and elasticity sound nice until you get big and they don't deliver.
  - flyt 11y ago
    This is categorically false. If you have large capacity needs talk to your TAMs/Account Manager and they can make it happen.
    - late2part 11y ago
      It's been true five times in the last three years for me. The elasticity isn't always there and service limits are not always granted when needed. I don't know what an AWS TAM is but the SAs have tried and failed. Make a new account and try to run 1000 c4.4xl in parallel for 1 hour. It won't happen. That's not what happened the five times, but it's illustrative. And who defines what is a need and what is a want?
      - slaman 11y ago
        That's because of a history of bitcoin mining abuse. People post their API keys on github every day and Amazon refunds almost all of the lost compute time.
nicobn 11y ago
Since you're dealing in absolutes, let me return the favor; you're being a little silly. Yes, Linode beats AWS when it comes to price. On the other hand, Linode's offer is incredibly basic and simplistic. AWS offers service after service that Linode simply doesn't and realistically cannot. Sure, you can emulate a subset of these services (and a subset of their features) using open-source software but at what price ? That's the major flaw in your reasoning. Getting to the point where your installations are as stable and reliable as AWS', given a large stress on the system, will cost you a lot of money and time. Directly comparing the cost of hardware access is ignoring other costs and headaches that are not very easy to estimate. There's a market for a service like Linode and there's a market for a service like AWS. You've simply never worked on a project/system that works better on AWS than on Linode. I know I couldn't run the systems that I currently operate on Linode without multiplying the workload that is needed to maintain them. Linode and AWS are competitors but there's space in the market for both; they simply fill different niches. Establishing one as absolutely superior to the other is silly and closed-minded. A lot of people chose AWS; go and ask them why (feel free to reach out to me at nick at nasx dot io - I'll be more than happy to talk to you).
- neya 11y ago
  Do you even understand his point? He is just nice enough to disclose his current employer. He's not recommending Linode. Really, all he's doing is just asking you to do some research and it needn't be Linode, there are plenty of alternatives out there. If we keep attacking the people for their honest disclosures, we're only discouraging them from expressing their conflict of interest in the future. Please. Don't.
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
  I'm really not trying to compare Linode to AWS here. I just felt that it was necessary to mention that I work for Linode because there _is_ some overlap. I'm really also not trying to sell anyone on Linode in particular. I'm pointing out that from my own personal experience, AWS is grossly overpriced and worse than the alternatives for a large number of use-cases.
  - 11y ago
EGreg 11y ago
We started with Linode. We moved to AWS. Here's the main reason: you can't decouple disk space from RAM. So we paid thru the nose just to get more disk space. With AWS it's pay for what you need. That's the killer feature for us.
- windowsworkstoo 11y ago
  Sure but you could have also just moved to SoftLayer or any number of dedicated hardware providers for the same, cheap probably cheaper, result.
  - EGreg 11y ago
    Which ones decouple disks from computer instances when it comes to paying?
BogusIKnow 11y ago
I'm working at a medium, growing startup and wonder when/why to use AWS? We currently use a mixture of root servers (DB) and VPS (App, HAProxy, NGinx) at a hoster. * We use a Docker/Consul/Nomad/SaltStack setup to install new servers for replacing broken ones and growth * App setup is Redis/Disque, Postgres(DB, BI) and app servers * New dedicated servers we get in around 1h, VPS in around 1min (Only VPS over API) * We have around 0.2 Ops FTE (devs rollout apps, ops for security updates, new infrastructure etc. and incidents) * Price seems to be way below Amazon
- tie_ 11y ago
  0.2 Full-time employees to build all the automation, scale up (and down!) the stack as needed, monitor, operate and maintain it at an HA level? That is a huge feat, and I'd love to read about how you pulled it off. Please consider sharing your story, and perhaps your Salt recipes ;) With all those things that you have in place, AWS would not be a big win for you, though you still might find some use of AWS services like S3 for reliable object storage, Route53 for DNS, or Lambda for "server-free" event handling. The unique thing about AWS is the huge portfolio of services they have and the absolutely amazing rate at which they manage to pump out new (and useful!) ones.
  - BogusIKnow 11y ago
    It takes some weeks to get it working, I'd say two to four, depending how often you've done it. Then for weeks there is nearly no Ops at all (security updates only mostly while the servers are humming) with releases done with Docker push by developers. Adding and provisioning a new VPS takes some seconds (and some seconds later checking), with Consul the stuff running on the VPS usually integrates itself). Sometimes hardware breaks down, then it's either setup a new VPS (setup_server <IP> <Role>) which takes around 5sec or mail the hoster if it's a DB server with a (mirrored RAID) SSD crash, which takes around 2h to fix all in all. So on average per year I'd guess 0,2 Ops FTE (which equals 10 weeks a year, which is a lot if you're not Facebook and don't need to do releases of new app versions). Today ops is relativly easy with a well trodden path, it's not 1999. The Salt is of the shelf, with some bash scripts on top to auto generate some config and make installation of a new server one script call. We surely could put endless hours into Ops, playing around with stuff etc. but the benefit would be marginal. Our DNS setup is simple, not much to say, we use DNS Made Easy for failover, we use S3 though I do not consider it "AWS" (S3 is comparativly cheap). I've wondered about Mesosphere with autoscaling etc. but with adding a new VPS in seconds setting up Mesosphere/Kubernetes taking two weeks would take quite some time to amortize.
djhworld 11y ago
If you're just using AWS for EC2 then you're probably better off with another provider, but I think the key advantage AWS has is in the 'WS' part of their name. Cloudwatch, SQS, SNS, Dynamo, S3 etc offer good managed services that you can plug into your applications/systems with not that much effort - and crucially very little OPS needed.
draw_down 11y ago
I can't believe this is the top comment. This is supposed to be about AWS advice, not your personal feelings about AWS. This comment is bad and you should feel bad and everyone who upvoted it should feel bad.
Hadi_Asiaie 11y ago
I've been a customer of linode for over a year and soon will be migrating to another provider, most probably Amazon. The main reason is a lot of connectivity issues and down time. I always hosted pet projects and simple web app on Linode, but just this week, I used it a for a major project. Now, the whole region of Fremont,CA has connectivity issues and is down for a couple of hours per day. The same happens for other regions as well. Maybe always it's been like that, but I've never paid attention. You can see their incident history in here: http://status.linode.com http://status.linode.com (I browsed it a little bit and it seems they had a lot issues in the past as well) I probably will lost about 6 times more money that Linode has saved me over AWS only for the down time in this week. So my suggestion is for a small-non critical projects you can use Linode, but for anything serious you better use something that is reliable.
- mwpmaybe 11y ago
  They've been getting DDoSed for the past week. I've had good luck getting credit from them after past outages.
bliti 11y ago
People pay for convenience. AWS is just convenient. Managing your own servers requires more work. It is far far far cheaper in terms of server costs. You do have to: - Know how to maintain a server by yourself - Hire someone who can AWS removes part of that and thus people pay for it. An average (good enough) sys admin costs the same as a programmer.
aws_ls 11y ago
A disclosure does not allow you to make a blanket statement like "Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS?". Reply by kawsper to your comment highlights several drawbacks of Linode. Specifically this feedback "Your API is a mess, and so is your documentation. Everything is GET-requests. And creating a new instance, shouldn't take 11 requests" alone, if true, is sufficient for me to not consider Linode for hosting. As being in an ultra small team of 2, we can't afford the luxury of API requests failing so many times. Having used AWS since 2010, and since 2007 for backups(s3), I can say that your comparison $20,000 in AWS vs $250 is wrong. Have you assumed a very foolish selection by a user? Where in a user will just pick up all their services (e.g. RDS for a DB, etc.) Just as a fact, we don't use RDS but install MySql by ourselves as it allows us to have other things on that instance, and also comes out cheap in comparison. On this note my contribution to the OP (article) would have been bundle different services on an instance, rather than buying stereotyped instances. Of course YMMV. The biggest advantage is for ultra small teams, where you have comfort of a stable environment, with respect to instances launching; APIs working; volumes getting attached/unattached; snapshots getting taken; backups done on s3. All taking place automatically, while you rest peacefully. I am not arguing that apples to apples Linode (or some other service) will not be cheaper than AWS. I am sure it will be. But still many people would like to stick with AWS because of stability and maturity of its cloud. Also you got to give credit to AWS for pioneering hourly billing, and disrupting the cloud environment. Despite agreeing with you mainly on the cheaper point, when I moved to AWS from dedicated hosting in 2010, my monthly bills reduced. Lastly. The experimentation. The wide variety of instances it has from micro (to the recently launched nano) to ultra large instances, allow you to experiment a lot. For example: in the past few months: I moved from couple m3.large to couple c4.xlarge, while experimenting in between on c3.xlarge type of instances. Finally, when you make such a blanket statement, you not only demonstrate your naivete but also undermine the decisions of thousands of satisfied AWS users. All said, I would like you (Linode) and others to be a good alternative. I am glad you are there. This is to keep AWS on its toes. Which is in my interest as their customer. PS: Lest my handle makes someone think, I represent AWS. Please be assured I do not. I just created this handle, when I had to ask an AWS specific question (you can check my first post in this handle). And then continued with it for other things. Edit: minor correction
ckgn 11y ago
Rather than badmouthing AWS while you are a Linode employee, I would suggest minding your own business and protect your network from the attacks and massive outages it faces over the last 5 days. A Linode client for more than 2 years, but now about to move elsewhere after 5 days of outages and no hope or official word explaining if the problem will be solved for good.

JabavuAdams 11y ago

As an AMZN shareholder, I encourage you to please use AWS. That is all.

tshtf 11y ago

In the past during security incidents (and there have been more three than major ones in as many years), there has been absolutely no transparency from Linode management. That's more than enough reason for serious customers to avoid Linode...

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
I don't think it's appropriate for me to comment on security incidents (before my time, anyway), but I'm not trying to sell people on Linode here. MediaCrush was actually using a combination of Voxility and Digital Ocean (and Route 53, actually). There are lots of options, guys.
seany 11y ago
I was going to say the same thing. The amount of transparency in general from aws is DRAMATICALLY better than linode.

CharlesW 11y ago

I feel like you wouldn't be too pleased if a super-biased Amazon employee posted a similarly anecdata-filled post about Linode. Is it really a smart idea to bad-mouth AWS in a post that really doesn't intersect with what Linode provides in any substantive way?

CaptSpify 11y ago
Considering he put the disclaimer that he is super-biased up front, I personally appreciate the insider review

cle 11y ago

There's a lot more that goes into the decision than service costs. There are lots of other costs that must be considered. E.g. if using AWS can save you one employee, that alone might make it worth the extra service costs. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your analysis is incomplete.

late2part 11y ago
I'm sure there's a situation where AWS saves money on TCO. If you ever find it, please let us know.
- discodave 11y ago
  Umm, does linode offer higher level services like SQS, Lambda, SWF and friends?
  - aeze 11y ago
    Their open source alternatives running on Linux?
    - stouset 11y ago
      Because ops is free.
    - discodave 11y ago
      + the cost of paying people to setup, deploy & manage these these things.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

busterarm 11y ago

AWS hands out credits like candy and there's tons of ways to get AWS credit or earn it. I wouldn't be surprised if cash-strapped startups built on AWS credit to go out and get funding and then just never move off of it.

late2part 11y ago
Correct. Lock-in is a key part of their strategy.

larrymcp 11y ago

Hmm. Well, somehow these heavy-hitters have presumably done their research and then chose AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ I see your characterization of AWS above as "terrible", but I'm curious how that squares with the (probably very well-informed) decisions these people made to use AWS.

jrochkind1 11y ago
I would not "do my research" on the sales site of one of the vendors, if that's what you're suggesting.
- zenlikethat 11y ago
  The poster is suggesting that the firms listed on Amazon's page did their research before buying, then settled on AWS and felt strongly enough that it was a good choice to make a public recommendation.
  - jrochkind1 11y ago
    Or got enough of a discount/payment to make a public recommendation in return?

bobbyi_settv 11y ago

Linode offers the equivalent of a tiny, tiny subset of AWS. I haven't looked recently, but do they have something equivalent to SQS? Autoscaling groups? DynamoDB? SES? Cloudwatch? If you are going to end up re-building AWS's services from scratch on top of what are essentially naked linux machines (or doing your integration work between services from many vendors), you are doing a huge amount of work that isn't necessary and will be a lot more expensive than that $20k/ month you could have been paying to Amazon.

late2part 11y ago
False. Most AWS services are implementations of open source solutions. Once you implement it yourself on Linux, the ongoing cost drops. With AWS you pay more the larger you get.
- eva1984 11y ago
  What? Implement RDS/SQS/Redshift myself? That is not easy, believe me.
  - ma2rten 11y ago
    It's not easy, but also not every difficult. The company I work for has two Dev Ops (only one until a year ago) and runs on AWS serving millions of users. We are using MySQL RDS, but are migrating to self-managed Cassandra. We use RabbitMQ instead of SQS. We use Hive/Presto instead of Redshift.
    - eva1984 11y ago
      You sure can adapt the open-sourced solution, though I don't think Cassandra/Presto can match up to what RDS/Redshift can offer. The key point is, running those things yourself, you are likely to lose all the nice failover mechanisms/monitoring/auto-snapshotting stuff that AWS offers. To live up to that, it will require you to not only have extensive understanding of the software you are running, but also a considerable amount of your time will be dedicated to Ops side, which can lead to some really big frustration from time to time. In that sense, I don't think you can re-IMPLEMENT something by assuming too much of comprises.

devonkim 11y ago

Most of the reasons to go with AWS as a major strategic decision are to avoid paying for 3-4 (or perhaps... 40+) ops engineers to run and manage so many things that really don't add much business value in themselves and that you could hold to some form of an SLA (especially with enterprise support accounts) and recoup some costs if things came down to it. Furthermore, engineering a lot of AWS services would cost you developer time as well. I consult / contract for a Fortune 50 customer that pays an insane amount of money to AWS per month and it seems ridiculous what they're paying for and what they get. But do you know what's even more ridiculous? Paying three times as much but getting even worse reliability and a massive amount of time wasted while waiting weeks to provision servers. One group internally used to have massive outages daily resulting in needing to hire a dedicated team of about 6 just to handle that load of production incidents (terrible reliability also resulting in loss of revenue too) and since migrating their software with even the most bone-headed SPF-everywhere AWS based software architecture haven't had more than one or two per week for outages now. The cost benefits get better the more incompetent / incapable your internal IT organization is. The amount of wasted resources due to internal bureaucracy, legacy, and working with companies that don't really practice any form of technology at scale has been an incredible amount of savings for my customer. And knowing how much my customer relies upon AWS support for the most menial of tasks (primarily a cultural thing with how they treat their vendors as well as internal resources) I am sure that nobody but massive companies that deal with external bureaucracies effectively could deliver the size and kind of support team to handle the volume of support requests generated by my customer for the most ridiculous of tasks (I've seen executives file AWS support requests to reboot VMs at 3 am because the bureaucracy is extremely brittle here and reflects into the software systems reliability). We may throw millions / month at AWS, but Amazon has to hire at least a few dozen engineers and several account managers just to handle support alone which I might argue could be a net loss to handle the customer. Most vendors that work with my customer have a very hard time working with them because they approach sourcing quite similar to how Walmart does and abuses them to the point where the vendors abuse their employees.

late2part 11y ago
"The cost benefits get better the more incompetent / incapable your internal IT organization is. " Yes. There will always be a less stupid solution out there that is not as bad as the bad solution. Or, you could fix IT. But that takes thought. Easier to give money to a vendor you can blame...?

skwirl 11y ago

This definitely reads like an ad for Linode to me and it really is turning me off from your company. Does the company know you are posting these comments on HN?

jamestnz 11y ago
This definitely reads like an ad for Linode to me and it really is turning me off from your company. Does the company know you are posting these comments on HN? Really? I didn't get that at all. What I saw was a post giving negative opinions on various aspects of AWS, and stating that AWS' offerings are available elsewhere. There was an example given, of a previous project where he'd switched away from AWS to dedicated physical servers (at an unnamed provider). There was no suspicious boosterism/puffery in the direction of his own employer, like you generally see when a shill is trying to get away with something. In fact, it seems like the only real mention he made of linode was in the disclosure that he kindly added, pointing out that he worked there and was therefore biased. Most ads don't bother to do that. If this counts as an ad, then by those standards nobody could ever post in any thread covering the industry in which they work.
skwirl 11y ago
Things are looking really bad for Linode: http://wptavern.com/linode-confirms-data-security-breach-that-matches-recent-wp-engine-attack http://wptavern.com/linode-confirms-data-security-breach-tha...

imp 11y ago

FWIW, I'm a current Linode customer that will be migrating to AWS soon. I like Linode as a basic provider, but I really need the better features such as ASGs, AMIs, and RDS. That's worth the higher cost per hour for me.

chucky_z 11y ago

I simply don't believe the $250 - $20,000 month comparison. Could you please provide some real-world numbers/hardware/stack information? I just did this migration (non-AWS -> AWS), and we saw a ~20% reduction in monthly prices with 1-year contract at AWS vs. physical hosting (admittedly we were getting terrible pricing with our physical hosts, but still). This will be reduced with the addition of t2.nano servers as we run enough t2.micro instances for little odds and ends that it will put a dent in the bill.

latch 11y ago
Your parent is [rightfully] including bandwidth. If he was able to get 1gbps unmetered, then the math is in the right ballpark (that's a huge if though). Still, I agree with the parent's general sentiment re price. The gap used to be much worse, but it's still anywhere from 2x-20x depending on what you're doing. - EC2 prices are simply high and exclude things like bandwidth. - The CPUs are usually 1-3 generations behind (they've gotten better with this). - Virtualization adds overhead (again, this can be very significant if you're doing a lot of system calls) - IO options are significantly worse - Their network connectivity is, at best, average You said it yourself, you're comparing a "terrible" deal to AWS and only saved 20%. Sounds to me like AWS is only 20% better than terrible ;)
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
  This is correct. The biggest cost I saw was bandwidth, followed by cycles on their machines. MediaCrush was a "media hosting website" (see original comment) and as such, used a lot of bandwidth and did a lot of work transcoding things, and had a large storage requirement.
  - wise_young_man 11y ago
    Were you comparing bandwidth/data transfer in your numbers for EC2, S3 or CloudFront?
    - Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago

kawsper 11y ago

Hi, first of all, thanks for your comment, and your full-disclosure. I am a happy Linode customer, and I have been using your service since 2010-09-02 (that is the date of the first invoice), but I have a few issues with your product that you might be able to look at. - It is too hard to figure out that you offer hourly billing, I found it by accident, and a year too late. - I tried out your Nodebalancers, as I thought they would be a nice help for my stack, but I ended up building my own Haproxy solution since the performance wasn't good. When I pay for a dedicated loadbalancers, I would expect it to be top-tuned from your side. - Your API is a mess, and so is your documentation. Everything is GET-requests. And creating a new instance, shouldn't take 11 requests, and a dance to set every little detail correctly. And to be fair, your documentation doesn't even document that, this is a subset of what I use: https://gist.github.com/kaspergrubbe/756f0a227db8aeb92818 https://gist.github.com/kaspergrubbe/756f0a227db8aeb92818 I even managed to find some errors in the documentation when I went through it, so it didn't feel very polished or tested, but maybe it isn't used a lot. It also seems strange that to emulate one or two clicks in the interface, needs 11 requests through the API. - Your advanced settings are extremely hard to find, especially "Edit Configuration Profile" and the "Auto-configure Networking" - Elastic IPs. I feel like it should be easier to swap IPs around Linodes, without me using heartbeatd, and some strange configs. This is much easier with Amazon, and one of the reason why I prefer them. - Anycast routing. Linode has several datacenters, it would be awesome if my setup in the US could have the same IP as my setup in the UK, because right now I am doing ugly DNS hacks to send my customers to the closest datacenter. Is this planned? - Lack of an object store, even though I use Linode, I am still using AWS S3, which means added latency, and I have to pay Amazon for outside traffic, you can't even compare with AWS on these things without starting to have these things. Can I setup a Linode through the API with private networking enabled? I am a happy customer, and I loved your KVM upgrade, I love your prices, and I love your service. But it would be nice to see more innovations happening.

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
Hi there. I wasn't looking to represent Linode tonight (just my personal opinions here), but I'll go ahead and fill you in. I can't say more than "I've made a note" of most of these things, but I wanted to mention that we're looking at overhauling some things that will definitely fix a lot of your gripes. Linode has been around for 13 years now, and a huge part of my job and the reason I was hired is to modernize a lot of the stale parts, including lots of the things that are frustrating you.

fizixer 11y ago

As neither a AWS or Linode customer (but might become one) I have a couple questions: - Can Linode offer short-term compute or memory intensive service? e.g., If I want to consume 100 teraflops 24x7 for about a couple weeks, or maybe 10 teraflops but a terabyte of memory. (Pay-as-you-go, not monthly/yearly subscription) - On top of that, Can I do above with my IPython notebook code, which is already setup (it uses numpy at the backend so python slowdown is not a problem), with a step-by-step process of how to make it run on Linode (without having to install python scientific stack)? These are some of the use cases that I think are getting popular these days, and for which AWS is known for, e.g., in the areas of machine learning, 3D rendering, etc.

late2part 11y ago
Good luck trying to get huge capacity from AWS with no history. Their service limits start low and ratchet slowly, if they have the capacity to give. All these features and elasticity sound nice until you get big and they don't deliver.
- flyt 11y ago
  This is categorically false. If you have large capacity needs talk to your TAMs/Account Manager and they can make it happen.
  - late2part 11y ago
    It's been true five times in the last three years for me. The elasticity isn't always there and service limits are not always granted when needed. I don't know what an AWS TAM is but the SAs have tried and failed. Make a new account and try to run 1000 c4.4xl in parallel for 1 hour. It won't happen. That's not what happened the five times, but it's illustrative. And who defines what is a need and what is a want?
    - slaman 11y ago
      That's because of a history of bitcoin mining abuse. People post their API keys on github every day and Amazon refunds almost all of the lost compute time.

nicobn 11y ago

Since you're dealing in absolutes, let me return the favor; you're being a little silly. Yes, Linode beats AWS when it comes to price. On the other hand, Linode's offer is incredibly basic and simplistic. AWS offers service after service that Linode simply doesn't and realistically cannot. Sure, you can emulate a subset of these services (and a subset of their features) using open-source software but at what price ? That's the major flaw in your reasoning. Getting to the point where your installations are as stable and reliable as AWS', given a large stress on the system, will cost you a lot of money and time. Directly comparing the cost of hardware access is ignoring other costs and headaches that are not very easy to estimate. There's a market for a service like Linode and there's a market for a service like AWS. You've simply never worked on a project/system that works better on AWS than on Linode. I know I couldn't run the systems that I currently operate on Linode without multiplying the workload that is needed to maintain them. Linode and AWS are competitors but there's space in the market for both; they simply fill different niches. Establishing one as absolutely superior to the other is silly and closed-minded. A lot of people chose AWS; go and ask them why (feel free to reach out to me at nick at nasx dot io - I'll be more than happy to talk to you).

neya 11y ago
Do you even understand his point? He is just nice enough to disclose his current employer. He's not recommending Linode. Really, all he's doing is just asking you to do some research and it needn't be Linode, there are plenty of alternatives out there. If we keep attacking the people for their honest disclosures, we're only discouraging them from expressing their conflict of interest in the future. Please. Don't.
Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
I'm really not trying to compare Linode to AWS here. I just felt that it was necessary to mention that I work for Linode because there _is_ some overlap. I'm really also not trying to sell anyone on Linode in particular. I'm pointing out that from my own personal experience, AWS is grossly overpriced and worse than the alternatives for a large number of use-cases.
- 11y ago

EGreg 11y ago

We started with Linode. We moved to AWS. Here's the main reason: you can't decouple disk space from RAM. So we paid thru the nose just to get more disk space. With AWS it's pay for what you need. That's the killer feature for us.

windowsworkstoo 11y ago
Sure but you could have also just moved to SoftLayer or any number of dedicated hardware providers for the same, cheap probably cheaper, result.
- EGreg 11y ago
  Which ones decouple disks from computer instances when it comes to paying?

BogusIKnow 11y ago

I'm working at a medium, growing startup and wonder when/why to use AWS? We currently use a mixture of root servers (DB) and VPS (App, HAProxy, NGinx) at a hoster. * We use a Docker/Consul/Nomad/SaltStack setup to install new servers for replacing broken ones and growth * App setup is Redis/Disque, Postgres(DB, BI) and app servers * New dedicated servers we get in around 1h, VPS in around 1min (Only VPS over API) * We have around 0.2 Ops FTE (devs rollout apps, ops for security updates, new infrastructure etc. and incidents) * Price seems to be way below Amazon

tie_ 11y ago
0.2 Full-time employees to build all the automation, scale up (and down!) the stack as needed, monitor, operate and maintain it at an HA level? That is a huge feat, and I'd love to read about how you pulled it off. Please consider sharing your story, and perhaps your Salt recipes ;) With all those things that you have in place, AWS would not be a big win for you, though you still might find some use of AWS services like S3 for reliable object storage, Route53 for DNS, or Lambda for "server-free" event handling. The unique thing about AWS is the huge portfolio of services they have and the absolutely amazing rate at which they manage to pump out new (and useful!) ones.
- BogusIKnow 11y ago
  It takes some weeks to get it working, I'd say two to four, depending how often you've done it. Then for weeks there is nearly no Ops at all (security updates only mostly while the servers are humming) with releases done with Docker push by developers. Adding and provisioning a new VPS takes some seconds (and some seconds later checking), with Consul the stuff running on the VPS usually integrates itself). Sometimes hardware breaks down, then it's either setup a new VPS (setup_server <IP> <Role>) which takes around 5sec or mail the hoster if it's a DB server with a (mirrored RAID) SSD crash, which takes around 2h to fix all in all. So on average per year I'd guess 0,2 Ops FTE (which equals 10 weeks a year, which is a lot if you're not Facebook and don't need to do releases of new app versions). Today ops is relativly easy with a well trodden path, it's not 1999. The Salt is of the shelf, with some bash scripts on top to auto generate some config and make installation of a new server one script call. We surely could put endless hours into Ops, playing around with stuff etc. but the benefit would be marginal. Our DNS setup is simple, not much to say, we use DNS Made Easy for failover, we use S3 though I do not consider it "AWS" (S3 is comparativly cheap). I've wondered about Mesosphere with autoscaling etc. but with adding a new VPS in seconds setting up Mesosphere/Kubernetes taking two weeks would take quite some time to amortize.

djhworld 11y ago

If you're just using AWS for EC2 then you're probably better off with another provider, but I think the key advantage AWS has is in the 'WS' part of their name. Cloudwatch, SQS, SNS, Dynamo, S3 etc offer good managed services that you can plug into your applications/systems with not that much effort - and crucially very little OPS needed.

draw_down 11y ago

I can't believe this is the top comment. This is supposed to be about AWS advice, not your personal feelings about AWS. This comment is bad and you should feel bad and everyone who upvoted it should feel bad.

Hadi_Asiaie 11y ago

I've been a customer of linode for over a year and soon will be migrating to another provider, most probably Amazon. The main reason is a lot of connectivity issues and down time. I always hosted pet projects and simple web app on Linode, but just this week, I used it a for a major project. Now, the whole region of Fremont,CA has connectivity issues and is down for a couple of hours per day. The same happens for other regions as well. Maybe always it's been like that, but I've never paid attention. You can see their incident history in here: http://status.linode.com http://status.linode.com (I browsed it a little bit and it seems they had a lot issues in the past as well) I probably will lost about 6 times more money that Linode has saved me over AWS only for the down time in this week. So my suggestion is for a small-non critical projects you can use Linode, but for anything serious you better use something that is reliable.

mwpmaybe 11y ago
They've been getting DDoSed for the past week. I've had good luck getting credit from them after past outages.

bliti 11y ago

People pay for convenience. AWS is just convenient. Managing your own servers requires more work. It is far far far cheaper in terms of server costs. You do have to: - Know how to maintain a server by yourself - Hire someone who can AWS removes part of that and thus people pay for it. An average (good enough) sys admin costs the same as a programmer.

aws_ls 11y ago

A disclosure does not allow you to make a blanket statement like "Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS?". Reply by kawsper to your comment highlights several drawbacks of Linode. Specifically this feedback "Your API is a mess, and so is your documentation. Everything is GET-requests. And creating a new instance, shouldn't take 11 requests" alone, if true, is sufficient for me to not consider Linode for hosting. As being in an ultra small team of 2, we can't afford the luxury of API requests failing so many times. Having used AWS since 2010, and since 2007 for backups(s3), I can say that your comparison $20,000 in AWS vs $250 is wrong. Have you assumed a very foolish selection by a user? Where in a user will just pick up all their services (e.g. RDS for a DB, etc.) Just as a fact, we don't use RDS but install MySql by ourselves as it allows us to have other things on that instance, and also comes out cheap in comparison. On this note my contribution to the OP (article) would have been bundle different services on an instance, rather than buying stereotyped instances. Of course YMMV. The biggest advantage is for ultra small teams, where you have comfort of a stable environment, with respect to instances launching; APIs working; volumes getting attached/unattached; snapshots getting taken; backups done on s3. All taking place automatically, while you rest peacefully. I am not arguing that apples to apples Linode (or some other service) will not be cheaper than AWS. I am sure it will be. But still many people would like to stick with AWS because of stability and maturity of its cloud. Also you got to give credit to AWS for pioneering hourly billing, and disrupting the cloud environment. Despite agreeing with you mainly on the cheaper point, when I moved to AWS from dedicated hosting in 2010, my monthly bills reduced. Lastly. The experimentation. The wide variety of instances it has from micro (to the recently launched nano) to ultra large instances, allow you to experiment a lot. For example: in the past few months: I moved from couple m3.large to couple c4.xlarge, while experimenting in between on c3.xlarge type of instances. Finally, when you make such a blanket statement, you not only demonstrate your naivete but also undermine the decisions of thousands of satisfied AWS users. All said, I would like you (Linode) and others to be a good alternative. I am glad you are there. This is to keep AWS on its toes. Which is in my interest as their customer. PS: Lest my handle makes someone think, I represent AWS. Please be assured I do not. I just created this handle, when I had to ask an AWS specific question (you can check my first post in this handle). And then continued with it for other things. Edit: minor correction

ckgn 11y ago

Rather than badmouthing AWS while you are a Linode employee, I would suggest minding your own business and protect your network from the attacks and massive outages it faces over the last 5 days. A Linode client for more than 2 years, but now about to move elsewhere after 5 days of outages and no hope or official word explaining if the problem will be solved for good.