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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, whi

by Fizzer 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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...

by Fizzer 14y ago

akh 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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...