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I agree with your entire comment with the exception of one sentence. Disagree as strongly as I can here: I've written vigorously (in previous comments) for usi

I agree with your entire comment with the exception of one sentence. Disagree as strongly as I can here: I've written vigorously (in previous comments) for using cloud servers like EC2 over dedicated hosting like SoftLayer. I'm less sure about that now. An issue at Amazon, or Rackspace, or Linode, or Slicehost need not imply failure at other providers and cloud as an alternative to dedicated is still as viable as ever. Amazon tanking does not mean everybody needs to run back to dedicated, and my pet peeve is that when one provider takes a crap everyone paints the cloud as toxic. When ThePlanet's facility exploded a few years ago I did not hear lamenting that dedicated hosting was doomed. When an airliner crashes we do not say air travel is doomed. I do not understand why people rush to paint cloud as a toxic choice in light of a failure of a certain player. Admittedly a big one but there are others too and you can move. Providers like Linode are almost exactly equivalent to dedicated hosting. They just administer the hardware for you and pay the remote hands bills. Same for Slicehost and Rackspace. It is simply far easier to wipe your instance and start over and for all intents and purposes it acts like a dedicated box. You need to administer it like one too. Most failures of the "cloud" are really designing your application in violation of the fallacies linked elsewhere.

mbreese 16y ago
Yeah, but Amazon is the 800 lbs gorilla in the room when it comes to the cloud. When most people say 'the cloud' they are referring to Amazon. So when Amazon has an issue, rightly or wrongly, the e tire sector gets a black eye.
btmorex 16y ago
Show me one cloud offering that gives consistently good or even average disk performance. (hint: there isn't one) Basically, if you're running a database that does not completely fit in memory you should be on dedicated hardware. I'd also point out that a lot of advantages that people routinely cite as cloud strengths are more about cloud vs traditional hosting or colocation as opposed to cloud vs a place like softlayer. softlayer can provision a custom build in a few hours (yeah vs. minutes, but who really cares that much) and you pay month-to-month without a contract.
- jsprinkles 16y ago
  I have found Linode disks to have the best performance in all http://pastebin.ca/2049137 http://pastebin.ca/2049137 You are correct, I/O is the challenge in administering systems in a virtual environment. My database which does not fit in memory does fine on a high-load site because I cache it responsibly. For comparison, here are awful results from a new player called ChunkHost, who I signed up for with the purpose of testing http://pastebin.ca/2049142 http://pastebin.ca/2049142 The sequential write throughput there is troubling. This comparison from a couple years back is interesting too http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison/ http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison/ I've linked this URL before but it really does the best of breaking it down. What cloud providers have you tried? In my experience there are vast gaps between certain ones, Amazon no exception. Hard to stereotype cloud with gaps like those. Even if SoftLayer could provision me a new box in ten minutes the improvement to my sleep from not waking up for every disk failure and submitting a remote hands ticket at who knows how much per pop far outweighs anything else.
  - whakojacko 16y ago
    I have also had good experience with linode performance (just a small instance I use for a few personal projects). However, AFAIK linode is just using local on-box disk, which is a whole different animal from EBS.
- moe 16y ago
  Show me one cloud offering that gives consistently good or even average disk performance. You mean like newservers.com, SoftLayer Bare Metal Cloud, stormondemand, or one of the other metal clouds?
- commx 16y ago
  To say that a database has to fit entirely in memory to achieve good performance is a ridiculous proposition, and simply shows you have zero actual knowledge of modern database server internals or administration. Countless sites happily serve oodles of pageviews per day with actual memory usage far below the disk space used by their databases. Hint: they're not swapping, either. In general, if you really believe what you're saying, you either (1) have a very poorly designed application, (2) have a very poorly designed database environment, or (3) are speaking to a specialized application that wouldn't reflect the majority of environments operating in real life. This isn't to say it isn't a combination of these options, mind you. I didn't even start on utilizing caching in applications, because it's clear there are other hurdles to overcome first.

mbreese 16y ago

Yeah, but Amazon is the 800 lbs gorilla in the room when it comes to the cloud. When most people say 'the cloud' they are referring to Amazon. So when Amazon has an issue, rightly or wrongly, the e tire sector gets a black eye.

btmorex 16y ago

Show me one cloud offering that gives consistently good or even average disk performance. (hint: there isn't one) Basically, if you're running a database that does not completely fit in memory you should be on dedicated hardware. I'd also point out that a lot of advantages that people routinely cite as cloud strengths are more about cloud vs traditional hosting or colocation as opposed to cloud vs a place like softlayer. softlayer can provision a custom build in a few hours (yeah vs. minutes, but who really cares that much) and you pay month-to-month without a contract.

jsprinkles 16y ago
I have found Linode disks to have the best performance in all http://pastebin.ca/2049137 http://pastebin.ca/2049137 You are correct, I/O is the challenge in administering systems in a virtual environment. My database which does not fit in memory does fine on a high-load site because I cache it responsibly. For comparison, here are awful results from a new player called ChunkHost, who I signed up for with the purpose of testing http://pastebin.ca/2049142 http://pastebin.ca/2049142 The sequential write throughput there is troubling. This comparison from a couple years back is interesting too http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison/ http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison/ I've linked this URL before but it really does the best of breaking it down. What cloud providers have you tried? In my experience there are vast gaps between certain ones, Amazon no exception. Hard to stereotype cloud with gaps like those. Even if SoftLayer could provision me a new box in ten minutes the improvement to my sleep from not waking up for every disk failure and submitting a remote hands ticket at who knows how much per pop far outweighs anything else.
- whakojacko 16y ago
  I have also had good experience with linode performance (just a small instance I use for a few personal projects). However, AFAIK linode is just using local on-box disk, which is a whole different animal from EBS.
moe 16y ago
Show me one cloud offering that gives consistently good or even average disk performance. You mean like newservers.com, SoftLayer Bare Metal Cloud, stormondemand, or one of the other metal clouds?
commx 16y ago
To say that a database has to fit entirely in memory to achieve good performance is a ridiculous proposition, and simply shows you have zero actual knowledge of modern database server internals or administration. Countless sites happily serve oodles of pageviews per day with actual memory usage far below the disk space used by their databases. Hint: they're not swapping, either. In general, if you really believe what you're saying, you either (1) have a very poorly designed application, (2) have a very poorly designed database environment, or (3) are speaking to a specialized application that wouldn't reflect the majority of environments operating in real life. This isn't to say it isn't a combination of these options, mind you. I didn't even start on utilizing caching in applications, because it's clear there are other hurdles to overcome first.