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Rackspace lets you burst CPU, whereas Amazon EC2 does not. It's not terribly surprising that Rackspace is performing better in that area. What you need to be c

by cylo 16y ago

Rackspace lets you burst CPU, whereas Amazon EC2 does not. It's not terribly surprising that Rackspace is performing better in that area. What you need to be careful about is the fact that EC2 and Rackspace Cloud are currently in two different leagues when it comes to controlling your instances. Amazon has a far better control panel (not to mention the API) for exercising granular control of your instances. Hard drive space is dynamically scalable on Amazon whereas it is not on Rackspace (their solution of mounting Rackspace Cloud Files via FUSE is unacceptable). The monitoring system for EC2 is also far better, and completely non-existent on Rackspace unless you pay them $99/mo out of pocket on top of your hourly usage charges. All in all, my Rackspace experience left a very bad taste in my mouth when dealing with their support, and it was a culmination of the small and simple things that left me frustrated (the lack of pv_grub support out of the box, etc., etc.) and kept me on EC2 despite the lack of CPU bursting.

eli 16y ago
Rackspace bought Cloudkick. I would expect the built-in monitoring to improve greatly in the near future.
aidos 16y ago
I've used both fairly extensively now and there are definitely pros and cons to each. I haven't done any solid benchmarking, but RS feels faster. It's also much easier/faster to get up and running whereas AWS has a bit of a barrier to entry. While at times I've been given incorrect info from them it's great to be able to get support staff on the live chat. I wouldn't necessarily choose it for all applications though. The AWS architecture is far more flexible in general. Elastic IPs are invaluable when it comes to creating a system that can grow over time (seamlessly switch from a single instance to several fronted by a load balancer in a couple of minutes). Being able to take complete snapshots of your system on an hourly basis could well save your business one day. Being able to make a couple of API calls to attach an extra 1 TB drive to your instance? That's worth losing a little horsepower over. It all depends on what you're after; with Rackspace you probably get a faster machines, but that's at the expense of being able to build a more robust generic solution for your needs.

by cylo 16y ago

eli 16y ago

Rackspace bought Cloudkick. I would expect the built-in monitoring to improve greatly in the near future.

aidos 16y ago

I've used both fairly extensively now and there are definitely pros and cons to each. I haven't done any solid benchmarking, but RS feels faster. It's also much easier/faster to get up and running whereas AWS has a bit of a barrier to entry. While at times I've been given incorrect info from them it's great to be able to get support staff on the live chat. I wouldn't necessarily choose it for all applications though. The AWS architecture is far more flexible in general. Elastic IPs are invaluable when it comes to creating a system that can grow over time (seamlessly switch from a single instance to several fronted by a load balancer in a couple of minutes). Being able to take complete snapshots of your system on an hourly basis could well save your business one day. Being able to make a couple of API calls to attach an extra 1 TB drive to your instance? That's worth losing a little horsepower over. It all depends on what you're after; with Rackspace you probably get a faster machines, but that's at the expense of being able to build a more robust generic solution for your needs.