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Apple failed in the server market. They have had success with the Mini. A Mini is cheaper than EC2, but that isn't the point of EC2. You don't run in EC2 bec
by alrs 14y ago
Apple failed in the server market. They have had success with the Mini.
A Mini is cheaper than EC2, but that isn't the point of EC2.
You don't run in EC2 because it is cheap or performant, you run there because you can spin up virtual machines quickly. You run there because it is adjacent to S3. You run there becuase it integrates with the likes of RDS, ELB, and Route 53.
- recuter 14y agoIt depends on your use case of course. If you spin up dozens of instances all the time then sure - but keep in mind that an email like "put another mini in my rack" gets executed in a few hours and is equivalent to quite a lot of compute units. That's rather the point, even very large spikes in growth can be swallowed by just a few of these in theory and certainly there are always enough Minis in close proximity such that it makes no difference.
- alrs 14y agoI disagree. EC2 is inherently unreliable, and so are consumer-grade desktops like Mac Minis. The strategy in EC2 is to be able to spin up replacements very quickly when your instances fail. The only strategy for a non-power-redundant, non-RAID, no-IPMI Mac Mini failure is the same, except replacement is measured in minutes or hours instead of seconds. This is huge.
- derefr 14y agoIf you're running above-capacity, a single failure of a box in any working set (routers, database shards, app servers, etc.) doesn't matter. Just wait the few hours and let the rest of your boxes silently absorb the load. If you're running exactly-at-capacity: why? (This presumes, though, that you're Highly Available enough to begin with that one node lost is a quantitative, not qualitative, failure in your system. If you only have one app server, time-to-reprovision is the least of your worries.)