5 ms·

And how much des the alternative cost? I'm not even sure what the alternative is, building your own data center?

by jshen 14y ago

druiid 14y ago
If you're e-commerce and rely on the kinds of up-time numbers that the post you are responding to references, that is generally the answer, yes (Well, not a full data-center for most guys, but at least your own platform which you know down to the motherboard jumper settings or whatever).
- jshen 14y ago
  I really don't understand. Knowing the hardware doesn't stop it from failing. There seems to be two approaches here. One, buy really expensive HA hardware. Two, build software that assumes failure and can handle it. Neither of these guarantee 100% uptime, but you can do the second one on a cloud without knowing the hardware. Side Note: I've done e-commerce, and e-commerce typically makes all of their money around christmas. It seems crazy to me to buy super expensive HA hardware that can handle your peak xmas throughput, and leave it idle for 11 months of the year.
rbanffy 14y ago
> building your own data center? Or data centers, plural. Now, seriously, if you can beat their reliability, you are in the wrong business. I'll pay you to host my services.
- nasalgoat 14y ago
  Amazon offers one nine of availability. I'm currently getting three on self-hosted equipment for a high-growth startup, with tens of thousands of concurrent users getting sub-second response times. The key is having intelligent staff who have a deep understanding of your specific environment. This guy's argument completely discounts the value of that - he's essentially saying that using PHP over writing in C is better because the PHP devs know better than you do how to make stuff work. My experience with EC2 support staff is that they are mostly concerned with their generic setup and are of no use when anything falls outside of that, and they especially can't provide any help for your specific problems.
  - jshen 14y ago
    of course EC2 has worse availability, but it has many other benefits. The question is whether those benefits are a good trade-off for you. When you say "staff who have a deep understanding", I'm not sure what you mean. Did they pick the RAID controllers? The UPS?
  - rbanffy 14y ago
    For how long have you been getting 3 nines? Would you be able to survive a data-center outage? A disk crash? A switch malfunction? A failed load balancer? A failed NAS?
msandford 14y ago
Buying colocation space with a negotiated SLA that provides for reimbursement in the case of outage. And building enough redundancy into your setup that even if a location goes completely offline you're still OK. It's REALLY hard to do that when you know nothing of the hardware and infrastructure that your app sits on. It's still difficult to do when you know all the details, but it's easier to control for risks that you are aware of.
- jshen 14y ago
  if you have to prepare for enough redundancy for a location to go down, then the cloud works just as well. I'm really not seeing the distinction here.
  - msandford 14y ago
    It's very difficult to buy a high bandwidth, low latency link from one AWS availability zone to another to ensure that my databases are synced properly such that if one of them goes down the other will stay up, and there will be minimal/no loss of data. But I can buy colo space from two different companies in two different but close cities and gain a lot of redundancy. Furthermore some kind of systematic problem that affects one of the datacenters run by one organization in one city is very unlikely to affect another datacenter run by another organization in another city. They're very unlikely to both make the exact same mistake and have it bite me in exactly the same way. But the AWS architecture is largely preserved even through availability zones, datacenters, etc. Easier for that to happen. http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-cloud-down-reddit-github-other-major-sites-affected-7000006166/ http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-cloud-down-reddit-github-other-m... That's an example of precisely the kind of problem that I'm referring to that wouldn't happen if you were redundant across multiple independently run datacenters.
    - jshen 14y ago
      That makes sense, and I agree, but this seems orthogonal to cloud vs non-cloud. If there were two cloud providers in different cities, and they allowed you to buy a good link, then the cloud meets this need too.

And how much des the alternative cost? I'm not even sure what the alternative is, building your own data center?

by jshen 14y ago

And how much des the alternative cost? I'm not even sure what the alternative is, building your own data center?

If you're e-commerce and rely on the kinds of up-time numbers that the post you are responding to references, that is generally the answer, yes (Well, not a full data-center for most guys, but at least your own platform which you know down to the motherboard jumper settings or whatever).

jshen 14y ago
I really don't understand. Knowing the hardware doesn't stop it from failing. There seems to be two approaches here. One, buy really expensive HA hardware. Two, build software that assumes failure and can handle it. Neither of these guarantee 100% uptime, but you can do the second one on a cloud without knowing the hardware. Side Note: I've done e-commerce, and e-commerce typically makes all of their money around christmas. It seems crazy to me to buy super expensive HA hardware that can handle your peak xmas throughput, and leave it idle for 11 months of the year.

rbanffy 14y ago

> building your own data center? Or data centers, plural. Now, seriously, if you can beat their reliability, you are in the wrong business. I'll pay you to host my services.

nasalgoat 14y ago
Amazon offers one nine of availability. I'm currently getting three on self-hosted equipment for a high-growth startup, with tens of thousands of concurrent users getting sub-second response times. The key is having intelligent staff who have a deep understanding of your specific environment. This guy's argument completely discounts the value of that - he's essentially saying that using PHP over writing in C is better because the PHP devs know better than you do how to make stuff work. My experience with EC2 support staff is that they are mostly concerned with their generic setup and are of no use when anything falls outside of that, and they especially can't provide any help for your specific problems.
- jshen 14y ago
  of course EC2 has worse availability, but it has many other benefits. The question is whether those benefits are a good trade-off for you. When you say "staff who have a deep understanding", I'm not sure what you mean. Did they pick the RAID controllers? The UPS?
- rbanffy 14y ago
  For how long have you been getting 3 nines? Would you be able to survive a data-center outage? A disk crash? A switch malfunction? A failed load balancer? A failed NAS?

msandford 14y ago

Buying colocation space with a negotiated SLA that provides for reimbursement in the case of outage. And building enough redundancy into your setup that even if a location goes completely offline you're still OK. It's REALLY hard to do that when you know nothing of the hardware and infrastructure that your app sits on. It's still difficult to do when you know all the details, but it's easier to control for risks that you are aware of.

jshen 14y ago
if you have to prepare for enough redundancy for a location to go down, then the cloud works just as well. I'm really not seeing the distinction here.
- msandford 14y ago
  It's very difficult to buy a high bandwidth, low latency link from one AWS availability zone to another to ensure that my databases are synced properly such that if one of them goes down the other will stay up, and there will be minimal/no loss of data. But I can buy colo space from two different companies in two different but close cities and gain a lot of redundancy. Furthermore some kind of systematic problem that affects one of the datacenters run by one organization in one city is very unlikely to affect another datacenter run by another organization in another city. They're very unlikely to both make the exact same mistake and have it bite me in exactly the same way. But the AWS architecture is largely preserved even through availability zones, datacenters, etc. Easier for that to happen. http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-cloud-down-reddit-github-other-major-sites-affected-7000006166/ http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-cloud-down-reddit-github-other-m... That's an example of precisely the kind of problem that I'm referring to that wouldn't happen if you were redundant across multiple independently run datacenters.
  - jshen 14y ago
    That makes sense, and I agree, but this seems orthogonal to cloud vs non-cloud. If there were two cloud providers in different cities, and they allowed you to buy a good link, then the cloud meets this need too.