6 ms·

Migrating from EC2 to Rackspace

56 points by anthony_barker 15y ago

shuzchen 15y ago
Having used a variety of cloud servers (Slicehost before the RS acquisition as well as after) I would agree that the cloud offering from RS has a long way to go, both in terms of features and performance. You get way better performance from Linode (for less money last I checked) and tons more features from EC2 (as outlined in the article). To me, the only good reasons to go with RS's cloud offerings are if you've already got dedicated machines with them (and want simplified billing, or integration via their hybrid hosting), or are planning to integrate heavily with their other cloud services (e.g. free network to cloudfiles)
- taligent 15y ago
  You also get significantly worse security and transparency from Linode versus EC2. * No multi-factor authentication for admin screens. * No ability to pass environment variables from admin screens to instances (useful for keeping logins off instances). * Customer support has ability to gain root access to machines. * Little to no information provided about security incidents. * Generally poor transparency for all incidents e.g. outages, security. * Recent history of major security incidents. * Inability to get all information in a single RSS feed.
jread 15y ago
I wrote about this topic on Quora a while back: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Amazon-EC2-compare-with-Rackspace-Cloud http://www.quora.com/How-does-Amazon-EC2-compare-with-Racksp... Most of the pros and cons listed there still apply. In it's current form, Rackspace Cloud compute is little more than VPS with a few cloud features. However, the next gen Rackspace cloud platform will make significant improvements: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/nextgen/ http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/nextgen/ For now, EC2 is a far superior compute platform in just about every way.
- moe 15y ago
  That's not quite right. The smaller rackspace instances tend to perform better than the smaller EC2 instances (anything below m1.large), especially in terms of I/O. If you don't need the advanced EC2 features then rackspace is also more comfortable to use (real IP addresses, no messing with EBS).
  - RKearney 15y ago
    EBS has nothing to do with IP Addresses. I presume you mean Elastic IP's? There isn't much "messing around" involved with setting up an Elastic IP on an EC2 instance if you want one. The way Amazon does it is arguably better because the IP address isn't locked to that instance and can be routed to any other running instance in that availability zone.
    - moe 15y ago
      No, EBS and IPs are separate issues. My point was that rackspace is easier to get going when all you want is "some servers" without building a lot of machinery upfront. They sell you a VPS, no more, no less, whereas EC2 exposes you to all sorts of magic that small deployments don't need. I.e. automating EBS attachment (reliably) is non-trivial. That's a major hurdle on EC2 if you're not familiar with it because most EBS-backed instances are deliberately on small volumes, thus you usually have to deal with it from day 1. Likewise the networking/NAT on EC2 is a royal pain in the ass for newbies and veterans alike. It's a poor design; public IPs could just as well be mapped directly, but as it stands anyone running on EC2 has to deal with that idiosyncrasy of the platform. And finally, price/performance really is better on the small rackspace instances versus the small amazon instances. As a rule of thumb: When you can get away with instances smaller than the 16G-rackspace then use rackspace (beyond that their pricing is even more ridiculous than amazon's). When you need bigger (or expect to need bigger in the future) then use EC2. And before you pick either make sure to remind yourself that the cloud (any platform) only makes sense for small or large deployments. If you're in the mid-range of 10-40 servers then renting dedicated servers will be drastically cheaper in almost all cases.
  - bradly 15y ago
piers 15y ago
It seems that they (Rackspace) are just about to launch something that might fix some of the issues that are being talked about: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/next-generation-rackspace-cloud-servers/ http://www.rackspace.com/blog/next-generation-rackspace-clou...
- anthony_barker 15y ago
  And the competition is heating up http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/openstack-vs-cloudstack-the-beginning-of-the-open-source-cloud-wars/10763 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/openstack-vs-cloudstac...
pat2man 15y ago
This article hits the big points quite well. We recently switched from Rackspace to EC2 for exactly these reasons. A few more points: • Amazon has a much larger network and you can use multiple availability zones. • Amazon supports VPCs, allowing you to mix your cloud services with your old school servers. • Amazon's CloudFront CDN allows you to use your own servers as a back end, not just static files. • There are a wealth of third party tools available for Amazon that just aren't there (yet) for Rackspace.
- jarito 15y ago
  Rackspace also supports the ability to combine Cloud and Physical servers. They call it Hybrid Hosting (http://www.rackspace.com/hosting_solutions/hybrid_hosting/ http://www.rackspace.com/hosting_solutions/hybrid_hosting/).
  - krobertson 15y ago
    Their hybrid offering still leaves a lot to be desired. They're more like two separate products, and even being on a sales call with them involved people from each team. It lacks a unified product experience.
- rsingel 15y ago
  Rackspace's Cloudfiles has been fantastic for us - we spent about $60 to serve 300GB of images to over 40 million visitors last month. That's over the superior Akamai network. In contrast, Amazon Cloudfiles charges per 10K requests, while only bandwidth counts with Cloudfiles. If we'd been on Cloudfront, we'd have paid more than 5x as much.
Fizzer 15y ago
I recently compared the price of Rackspace, EC2, and Azure. If you compare the prices per GB of RAM, EC2 is far, far better than both Rackspace and Azure, which are about equal to each other. This only further solidifies the argument for EC2. Here's a graph of the three provider's prices: http://i.imgur.com/G2laJ.png http://i.imgur.com/G2laJ.png
- akh 15y ago
  Agreed, here's more evidence of the cost differences: http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/02/holy-cow-rackspace-uk-cloud-would-be.html http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/02/holy-cow-rackspace-uk-c... You can use http://www.ShopForCloud.com http://www.ShopForCloud.com to do other similar comparisons.
  - Kudos 15y ago
    As pointed out in other comments, you didn't actually bench them and it turns out that Rackspace is better bang for buck in CPU terms. I wonder how much of your data is flawed in the same way.
    - akh 15y ago
      I don't think it's as simple as saying "Rackspace is better bang for buck in CPU terms". This is a complicated area and one which is being researched at universities. See [1] for one such research project, which mentions that there is even a "reasonable extent of variation amongst instances from the same providers". It's also application specific and hard to predict (who knows what other VMs will be running on the same physical box as your VM in the future). Our blog post was a first step in this sort of comparison, where we wanted to see if there was a significant-enough difference between providers to warrant further studies. Also, see asharp's comment above about Rackspace using a credit scheduler with burst capacity. [1] Lee Gillam, Bin Li, John O.Loughlin and Anuz Pranap Singh Tomar (2012) "Fair Benchmarking for Cloud Computing Systems". http://www.cs.surrey.ac.uk/BIMA/People/L.Gillam/downloads/publications/Fair%20Benchmarking%20for%20Cloud%20Computing%20Systems.pdf http://www.cs.surrey.ac.uk/BIMA/People/L.Gillam/downloads/pu...
anthony_barker 15y ago
The ones that I noticed in my eval of rackspace 1) internal traffic between boxes at rackspace is on the public network unless you setup ipsec/ssl http://serverfault.com/questions/184655/suggestions-for-vpn-solution-between-backend-servers http://serverfault.com/questions/184655/suggestions-for-vpn-... 2) Definite lack of firewalls and no deep packet inspection 3) No free micro tier for testing/dev Others: a) I don't like all the naming conventions of AWS - reminds me of Starbucks where a small is "tall" b) Neither seem to offer IDS out of the box and/or outgoing firewalls although one can set-up snort/sourcefire (AWS offers this) https://aws.amazon.com/solution-providers/isv/sourcefire https://aws.amazon.com/solution-providers/isv/sourcefire c) No two factor authentication services out of the box for application authentication(need to use yubikey/duo security)
- Cloven 15y ago
  1) no, rackspace boxes have two networks; an internal (inside the cloud) and an external (public)
spamizbad 15y ago
If you're running Windows cloud services, I tend to find Rackspace's cloud easier to deal with. I use it extensively for compatibility testing, and have found it preferable to EC2 in this regard. Setting up Windows VMs is easier with Rackspace, as opposed to EC2 which has a terrible process and UI for their windows stuff. With that said, If I was building out legitimate infrastructure, as opposed to just a developer test platform, the article correctly points out the superiority of EC2 over Rackspace. EC2 has a powerful API that's unmatched in the public cloud space.
raverbashing 15y ago
Actually the main issue is: Sure, you can run an Amazon EC2 machine 24/7 (and get a 'competitive price') But if that's your main usage pattern, go for Rackspace, Linode, etc EC2 really shines on 'on demand' computing. Turning it up to 11 when you need it and decomissioning it soon after. Sure, it's usual to keep 1 or 2 machines working full time. Whereas in Rackspace what you do is start a machine (you can pick from several configs) and have it running permanently. And AWS offer several services that are still sometimes missing from the competition (like CloudFront, Route53, etc)
SoftwareMaven 15y ago
Our long-range goal is to host our own infrastructure. I chose Rackspace because of OpenStack. I want the majority of my development effort to be applicable when we decide to make that change.
ozataman 15y ago
The message seems to be "don't".

Having used a variety of cloud servers (Slicehost before the RS acquisition as well as after) I would agree that the cloud offering from RS has a long way to go, both in terms of features and performance. You get way better performance from Linode (for less money last I checked) and tons more features from EC2 (as outlined in the article). To me, the only good reasons to go with RS's cloud offerings are if you've already got dedicated machines with them (and want simplified billing, or integration via their hybrid hosting), or are planning to integrate heavily with their other cloud services (e.g. free network to cloudfiles)

taligent 15y ago
You also get significantly worse security and transparency from Linode versus EC2. * No multi-factor authentication for admin screens. * No ability to pass environment variables from admin screens to instances (useful for keeping logins off instances). * Customer support has ability to gain root access to machines. * Little to no information provided about security incidents. * Generally poor transparency for all incidents e.g. outages, security. * Recent history of major security incidents. * Inability to get all information in a single RSS feed.

jread 15y ago

I wrote about this topic on Quora a while back: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Amazon-EC2-compare-with-Rackspace-Cloud http://www.quora.com/How-does-Amazon-EC2-compare-with-Racksp... Most of the pros and cons listed there still apply. In it's current form, Rackspace Cloud compute is little more than VPS with a few cloud features. However, the next gen Rackspace cloud platform will make significant improvements: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/nextgen/ http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/nextgen/ For now, EC2 is a far superior compute platform in just about every way.

moe 15y ago
That's not quite right. The smaller rackspace instances tend to perform better than the smaller EC2 instances (anything below m1.large), especially in terms of I/O. If you don't need the advanced EC2 features then rackspace is also more comfortable to use (real IP addresses, no messing with EBS).
- RKearney 15y ago
  EBS has nothing to do with IP Addresses. I presume you mean Elastic IP's? There isn't much "messing around" involved with setting up an Elastic IP on an EC2 instance if you want one. The way Amazon does it is arguably better because the IP address isn't locked to that instance and can be routed to any other running instance in that availability zone.
  - moe 15y ago
    No, EBS and IPs are separate issues. My point was that rackspace is easier to get going when all you want is "some servers" without building a lot of machinery upfront. They sell you a VPS, no more, no less, whereas EC2 exposes you to all sorts of magic that small deployments don't need. I.e. automating EBS attachment (reliably) is non-trivial. That's a major hurdle on EC2 if you're not familiar with it because most EBS-backed instances are deliberately on small volumes, thus you usually have to deal with it from day 1. Likewise the networking/NAT on EC2 is a royal pain in the ass for newbies and veterans alike. It's a poor design; public IPs could just as well be mapped directly, but as it stands anyone running on EC2 has to deal with that idiosyncrasy of the platform. And finally, price/performance really is better on the small rackspace instances versus the small amazon instances. As a rule of thumb: When you can get away with instances smaller than the 16G-rackspace then use rackspace (beyond that their pricing is even more ridiculous than amazon's). When you need bigger (or expect to need bigger in the future) then use EC2. And before you pick either make sure to remind yourself that the cloud (any platform) only makes sense for small or large deployments. If you're in the mid-range of 10-40 servers then renting dedicated servers will be drastically cheaper in almost all cases.
- bradly 15y ago

piers 15y ago

It seems that they (Rackspace) are just about to launch something that might fix some of the issues that are being talked about: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/next-generation-rackspace-cloud-servers/ http://www.rackspace.com/blog/next-generation-rackspace-clou...

anthony_barker 15y ago
And the competition is heating up http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/openstack-vs-cloudstack-the-beginning-of-the-open-source-cloud-wars/10763 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/openstack-vs-cloudstac...

pat2man 15y ago

This article hits the big points quite well. We recently switched from Rackspace to EC2 for exactly these reasons. A few more points: • Amazon has a much larger network and you can use multiple availability zones. • Amazon supports VPCs, allowing you to mix your cloud services with your old school servers. • Amazon's CloudFront CDN allows you to use your own servers as a back end, not just static files. • There are a wealth of third party tools available for Amazon that just aren't there (yet) for Rackspace.

jarito 15y ago
Rackspace also supports the ability to combine Cloud and Physical servers. They call it Hybrid Hosting (http://www.rackspace.com/hosting_solutions/hybrid_hosting/ http://www.rackspace.com/hosting_solutions/hybrid_hosting/).
- krobertson 15y ago
  Their hybrid offering still leaves a lot to be desired. They're more like two separate products, and even being on a sales call with them involved people from each team. It lacks a unified product experience.
rsingel 15y ago
Rackspace's Cloudfiles has been fantastic for us - we spent about $60 to serve 300GB of images to over 40 million visitors last month. That's over the superior Akamai network. In contrast, Amazon Cloudfiles charges per 10K requests, while only bandwidth counts with Cloudfiles. If we'd been on Cloudfront, we'd have paid more than 5x as much.

Fizzer 15y ago

I recently compared the price of Rackspace, EC2, and Azure. If you compare the prices per GB of RAM, EC2 is far, far better than both Rackspace and Azure, which are about equal to each other. This only further solidifies the argument for EC2. Here's a graph of the three provider's prices: http://i.imgur.com/G2laJ.png http://i.imgur.com/G2laJ.png

akh 15y ago
Agreed, here's more evidence of the cost differences: http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/02/holy-cow-rackspace-uk-cloud-would-be.html http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/02/holy-cow-rackspace-uk-c... You can use http://www.ShopForCloud.com http://www.ShopForCloud.com to do other similar comparisons.
- Kudos 15y ago
  As pointed out in other comments, you didn't actually bench them and it turns out that Rackspace is better bang for buck in CPU terms. I wonder how much of your data is flawed in the same way.
  - akh 15y ago
    I don't think it's as simple as saying "Rackspace is better bang for buck in CPU terms". This is a complicated area and one which is being researched at universities. See [1] for one such research project, which mentions that there is even a "reasonable extent of variation amongst instances from the same providers". It's also application specific and hard to predict (who knows what other VMs will be running on the same physical box as your VM in the future). Our blog post was a first step in this sort of comparison, where we wanted to see if there was a significant-enough difference between providers to warrant further studies. Also, see asharp's comment above about Rackspace using a credit scheduler with burst capacity. [1] Lee Gillam, Bin Li, John O.Loughlin and Anuz Pranap Singh Tomar (2012) "Fair Benchmarking for Cloud Computing Systems". http://www.cs.surrey.ac.uk/BIMA/People/L.Gillam/downloads/publications/Fair%20Benchmarking%20for%20Cloud%20Computing%20Systems.pdf http://www.cs.surrey.ac.uk/BIMA/People/L.Gillam/downloads/pu...

anthony_barker 15y ago

The ones that I noticed in my eval of rackspace 1) internal traffic between boxes at rackspace is on the public network unless you setup ipsec/ssl http://serverfault.com/questions/184655/suggestions-for-vpn-solution-between-backend-servers http://serverfault.com/questions/184655/suggestions-for-vpn-... 2) Definite lack of firewalls and no deep packet inspection 3) No free micro tier for testing/dev Others: a) I don't like all the naming conventions of AWS - reminds me of Starbucks where a small is "tall" b) Neither seem to offer IDS out of the box and/or outgoing firewalls although one can set-up snort/sourcefire (AWS offers this) https://aws.amazon.com/solution-providers/isv/sourcefire https://aws.amazon.com/solution-providers/isv/sourcefire c) No two factor authentication services out of the box for application authentication(need to use yubikey/duo security)

Cloven 15y ago
1) no, rackspace boxes have two networks; an internal (inside the cloud) and an external (public)

spamizbad 15y ago

If you're running Windows cloud services, I tend to find Rackspace's cloud easier to deal with. I use it extensively for compatibility testing, and have found it preferable to EC2 in this regard. Setting up Windows VMs is easier with Rackspace, as opposed to EC2 which has a terrible process and UI for their windows stuff. With that said, If I was building out legitimate infrastructure, as opposed to just a developer test platform, the article correctly points out the superiority of EC2 over Rackspace. EC2 has a powerful API that's unmatched in the public cloud space.

raverbashing 15y ago

Actually the main issue is: Sure, you can run an Amazon EC2 machine 24/7 (and get a 'competitive price') But if that's your main usage pattern, go for Rackspace, Linode, etc EC2 really shines on 'on demand' computing. Turning it up to 11 when you need it and decomissioning it soon after. Sure, it's usual to keep 1 or 2 machines working full time. Whereas in Rackspace what you do is start a machine (you can pick from several configs) and have it running permanently. And AWS offer several services that are still sometimes missing from the competition (like CloudFront, Route53, etc)

SoftwareMaven 15y ago

Our long-range goal is to host our own infrastructure. I chose Rackspace because of OpenStack. I want the majority of my development effort to be applicable when we decide to make that change.

ozataman 15y ago

The message seems to be "don't".