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If you want just 1 or 2 mid-sized servers running 24x7 with traditional software on them like an RDMS, AWS is almost entirely the wrong choice. A single AWS in

by EwanToo 15y ago

If you want just 1 or 2 mid-sized servers running 24x7 with traditional software on them like an RDMS, AWS is almost entirely the wrong choice. A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed to be particularly reliable. The real power of AWS isn't the ability to stop and start cheap instances quickly, it comes from services like S3 and Elastic Load Balancing, and SimpleDB. If you build your systems on top of these extremely reliable services, you can achieve uptime much greater than you can achieve with 1 or 2 standalone servers (whether they've got the word "cloud" in their name or not), while not spending the massive amounts on high availability or fault tolerance that you previously had to pay.

Loic 15y ago
In my case it is more like 5x24GB RAM servers supporting 20 to 50 VMs depending on the load coupled with a very reliable managed NAS for backup. I can start/stop some instances using my provider's "cloud" if needed, but found that in practice, I always have room on my own hardware. For the reliability, over 10 years of hosting, I cross my fingers, I have not been hit by any major incident. So, my services have something like a 99.96+% availability and up to now, no data loss or things like that. When reading how much thinking NetFlix had to put in to adjust to the variance in the performance of the VMs/networking/etc. in the cloud (Cf. http://techblog.netflix.com/ http://techblog.netflix.com/) I am happy as a very small shop to not have to think too much about this. A bit yes, but not so drastically. This is why I tend to be happy having "a bit more control" and the current tools like Ganeti are making the management part of the VMs as simple (if not simpler) than with EC2. Anyway, thanks a lot for the feedback, it kind of confirm that I am not totally stupid. :D
EponymousCoward 15y ago
"A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed to be particularly reliable." Source? An AWS instance is simply an OS running on a virtualf (xen?) machine. On the largest instances you may in fact be the only virtual machine on the physical hardware. Why would you feel more comfortable running a single instance outside of AWS? Your safety is just an illusion. Your MTTR is out the window. When you go down, youll have an outage that goes like this: "we'll be back in a day or two when I order new hardware and drive it to the colo. Also, the database will be time warping to the last backuP 24 hours ago." Running on a single machine is never safe and AWS is cheap enough and comes with enough tools (ELB, RDS, maybe EBS) to allow you to become truly redundant and single fault tolerant.
- rkalla 15y ago
  > "A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed > to be particularly reliable." > Source? Reading the AWS EC2 forums for any length of time or launching your own EC2 instances into production and watching them fall over from time to time. All arbitrary, but I don't think anyone that has deployed on EC2 with more than a handful of servers would ever describe it as an overly stable service. > Why would you feel more comfortable running a single instance outside of AWS? Your safety is just an illusion. In theory, absolutely agree. It sounds like you were agreeing with the OP to be honest, but just getting pedantic about single-AWS instance vs single-dedicated instance in another hosting company. Sure, best practices dictate trusting a single point of failure is not a good idea. In practice, my dedicated deployments (at RimuHosting if that matters) are infinitely more stable than my EC2 deployments and I think that data point is worth something -- not going to bet the farm on it, but I'm also not going to treat my dedicated servers like I would flaky EC2 VMs. > Running on a single machine is never safe and AWS is cheap enough and comes with enough tools (ELB, RDS, maybe EBS) to allow you to become truly redundant and single fault tolerant. You are agreeing with the EwanToo from what I can tell...
- rbranson 15y ago
  AWS seems really stable to me. Hundreds of days of uptime are the norm, if the instances even run that long. However, there IS a pretty huge gap that exists between managed colocation and EC2. There are dedicated servers that can be ready in an hour or so, cloud-like baremetal "instant" provisioners, and über-VPS providers like Linode and Rackspace Cloud.

by EwanToo 15y ago

Loic 15y ago

In my case it is more like 5x24GB RAM servers supporting 20 to 50 VMs depending on the load coupled with a very reliable managed NAS for backup. I can start/stop some instances using my provider's "cloud" if needed, but found that in practice, I always have room on my own hardware. For the reliability, over 10 years of hosting, I cross my fingers, I have not been hit by any major incident. So, my services have something like a 99.96+% availability and up to now, no data loss or things like that. When reading how much thinking NetFlix had to put in to adjust to the variance in the performance of the VMs/networking/etc. in the cloud (Cf. http://techblog.netflix.com/ http://techblog.netflix.com/) I am happy as a very small shop to not have to think too much about this. A bit yes, but not so drastically. This is why I tend to be happy having "a bit more control" and the current tools like Ganeti are making the management part of the VMs as simple (if not simpler) than with EC2. Anyway, thanks a lot for the feedback, it kind of confirm that I am not totally stupid. :D

EponymousCoward 15y ago

"A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed to be particularly reliable." Source? An AWS instance is simply an OS running on a virtualf (xen?) machine. On the largest instances you may in fact be the only virtual machine on the physical hardware. Why would you feel more comfortable running a single instance outside of AWS? Your safety is just an illusion. Your MTTR is out the window. When you go down, youll have an outage that goes like this: "we'll be back in a day or two when I order new hardware and drive it to the colo. Also, the database will be time warping to the last backuP 24 hours ago." Running on a single machine is never safe and AWS is cheap enough and comes with enough tools (ELB, RDS, maybe EBS) to allow you to become truly redundant and single fault tolerant.

rkalla 15y ago
> "A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed > to be particularly reliable." > Source? Reading the AWS EC2 forums for any length of time or launching your own EC2 instances into production and watching them fall over from time to time. All arbitrary, but I don't think anyone that has deployed on EC2 with more than a handful of servers would ever describe it as an overly stable service. > Why would you feel more comfortable running a single instance outside of AWS? Your safety is just an illusion. In theory, absolutely agree. It sounds like you were agreeing with the OP to be honest, but just getting pedantic about single-AWS instance vs single-dedicated instance in another hosting company. Sure, best practices dictate trusting a single point of failure is not a good idea. In practice, my dedicated deployments (at RimuHosting if that matters) are infinitely more stable than my EC2 deployments and I think that data point is worth something -- not going to bet the farm on it, but I'm also not going to treat my dedicated servers like I would flaky EC2 VMs. > Running on a single machine is never safe and AWS is cheap enough and comes with enough tools (ELB, RDS, maybe EBS) to allow you to become truly redundant and single fault tolerant. You are agreeing with the EwanToo from what I can tell...
rbranson 15y ago
AWS seems really stable to me. Hundreds of days of uptime are the norm, if the instances even run that long. However, there IS a pretty huge gap that exists between managed colocation and EC2. There are dedicated servers that can be ready in an hour or so, cloud-like baremetal "instant" provisioners, and über-VPS providers like Linode and Rackspace Cloud.