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Has Amazon EC2 become over subscribed? (2010)
- niggler 14y agoIs there any scale (like xlarge) where you are effectively the only VM on a particular physical machine (thereby obviating the issue with the small instances)?
- DrStalker 14y agoYou can pay extra for dedicated Instances: http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/ http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/ > Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances launched within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) that run hardware dedicated to a single customer.
- eurleif 14y ago$10/hour per region? Wow.
- niggler 14y agoTo be fair, though: "An additional fee is charged once per hour in which at least one Dedicated Instance of any type is running in a Region." So it's not like they are charging $10/hr/instance (so it amortizes over all of the dedicated instances)
- jamesaguilar 14y agoStill, that's 100k a year, not including the cost of the actual instances. Not an option for smaller services unless your stuff simply can't be made to work without dedicated instances.
- eurleif 14y agoI doubt it would ever make sense to use this over dedicated servers, except at a large scale.
- ceejayoz 14y agoYou can pay a (hefty) fee for dedicated tenancy, where your EC2 instances only share servers with other instances in your account. The largest instances (the quad- and octuple-extra-large) likely are on their own servers but I've never seen that explicitly confirmed anywhere.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Xorlev 14y agoc1.xlarges are thought to be effectively the only VM on a machine. I can't dig up the article that proposed the methodology for determining offhand. c1.xlarges still underperform far under what I'd expect.
- sliverstorm 14y agoAre VMs ever really performant?
- Xorlev 14y agoCompared to the 26 ECU m3.2xl, the 20 ECU c1.xl underperforms it by 3x (basic web, JSON struct) in my tests.
- corresation 14y agoModern hypervisors have an overhead as low as 2%, so yes, they absolutely are. It is often worth virtualizing simply for the flexibility/management that it bring, even if it's a single virtual machine on a very large box.
- staunch 14y ago...and here's part of why I created Uptano. https://uptano.com https://uptano.com The flexibility of usage-based billing and instant provisioning is awesome, but it's really not worth giving up dedicated performance IMHO.
- jamesaguilar 14y agoI upvoted because I love HN comments that offer solutions. That said . . . how can you charge half as much as Amazon for the same service and make a profit. I assume their margins are not that fat, so what are you cutting that they offer? Or else what secret have you discovered that no one knows? I guess since this is your business there's a chance that you won't answer, but I'm curious.
- RyanZAG 14y agoAWS uses high end, expensive enterprise grade parts (I believe), meanwhile uptano is likely using standard off the shelf parts, likely with bulk account discounts. Each of those servers could likely be put together for $500 - at $100/month, he should be making very good margins after a year or so. I have no idea on rent/electricity/etc, but with enough 1U servers the total cost per server may be only $10/month or so. The big costs you pay for on AWS are the engineering, networking and UI development. Dedicated servers should be easier to provision and manage and he probably has a much smaller team. So theoretically, it is possible that his prices are half as much as Amazon and he still makes a decent profit.
- johansch 14y agoMore like giant margins... http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-big-ripoff/ http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-...
- fooyc 14y agoAmazon reserved instances cost 2 to 10 times the price of renting a private dedicated server at your random dedicated server hosting service. Compare youself: https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/ https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/
- LogicX 14y agoSomewhere between uptano and EC2 is internap (formerly Voxel.net) agileservers: http://www.internap.com/agile/ http://www.internap.com/agile/
- trotsky 14y agoI was trying to figure out how this guy could be so behind the times - just discovered internal network latency at AWS? Then I saw: Published: 9:01 AM GMT, Tuesday, 12 January 2010
- ultimoo 14y agoYes, the year of the blog should definitely be present in the HN title. That said, what is the deal with the internal network latency and the other points the OP touched upon today? Did Amazon get around to resolving things, or have things worsened?
- seldo 14y agoMy non-rigorous impression is that latency is roughly the same now as it was in 2010, i.e. not great, but at least it hasn't been getting worse.
- t0 14y agoCan you enlighten us? Why is it so slow? Are some people abusing all of that free bandwidth? Is their LAN simply not built to handle much traffic?
- trotsky 14y agoI don't have any inside information, but I would guess it's because their san is so sketchy everyone rolls their own DFS and uses other chatty replication strategies, leaving the network running data and disk on the same topology. These days a lot of that traffic will take 4 hops within an AZ.
- redact207 14y agoHave there been any improvements since then?
- codewright 14y agoNo, it's still common to have in-house "find a good node" code that fires up and takes down machines until one that will be reliable is found.
- rabbidruster 14y agoWhile I understand computer scientists are not always the best writers, phrases like "Amazon do have a breaking point" make it hard to continue reading this article.
- mattdeboard 14y agoMight have been using it like "The cattle do graze", or "Black Sabbath do have a new album coming out".
- philwelch 14y agoI'm curious what you find wrong with that sentence.
- icedchai 14y agoWe're from America. We speak Murican.
- spicyj 14y agoIf it's the plural conjugation you're complaining about, know that that's correct in British English: http://english.stackexchange.com/a/1339/50 http://english.stackexchange.com/a/1339/50.
- rabbidruster 14y agoThanks for the link. It sounded extremely weird to me. I didn't know corp were often plural nouns in British English.
- johndonsu 14y agoYour arrogance is astounding. This is why people hate Americans. An English person, writing English in an English way, and you say you're not going to continue reading. Do you require him to write like an American? Why should an English person, writing their own language, have to follow your conventions? "I didn't know" Well then don't start shouting your mouth off! If you don't know, keep quiet.
- rattray 14y agoIs there a cloud provider that doesn't (yet) have these issues? Is it possible to run any cloud service at Amazon's scale without these issues? (genuine questions speaking from a point of ignorance)
- rdl 14y agoSome of the OpenStack providers run their own storage networks using conventional SAN tech. Super expensive but more consistently performant.
- dmpk2k 14y agoMy experience with SANs is that they are anything but consistent. Local storage is a better idea: fewer moving pieces to go wrong, fewer moving pieces to understand and debug, fewer possible sources of contention, and the latency is low. SANs in a cloud environment optimize for the wrong thing. Servers by and large have a high uptime -- since their falling over is comparatively rare, this is simply a problem I've never had difficulty with. What I have had in spades, before I learned better, were database problems due to wild fluctuations in latency to the SAN. It doesn't help that when SANs kick the bucket, they tend to affect a lot of things.
- rdl 14y agoThe context where SANs make sense, IMO, is when you've got a few servers which need to share stuff (VMs, or whatever). So, essentially everything can fit on one $10k 10GE switch. I've personally never screwed with anything >800TB, too. Rather than "strictly local storage", I'd say "keep storage as local as possible", but there are absolutely times where keeping it in-chassis isn't optimal.
- stonith 14y agoThere are some using Ceph for the volume service who shouldn't be terribly expensive. Dreamhost for example.
- joefarish 14y ago
- JoshGlazebrook 14y agoI've had these issues with the micro instances before. One deployment will be so sluggish it's almost unusable, but starting up another one results in one that is just fine (micro wise).
- rbc 14y agoOne think that I think may be oversubscribed at EC2 is the API layer for controlling things like instances, ELB's and autoscaling. This seems to be most obvious in Virginia. During the lightning storm in Virginia last summer, it seemed like API access fell off a cliff. I'm guessing that was because everyone was trying to move their services from the impacted availability zone.
- dotBen 14y agoI'm loathed to perpetuate a 3 year old article, but... One of the key contributing factors to this kind of network degradation of AWS (/or other cloud vendor) is the abundance of the "bad neighbor test" - where a client performs tests to see if they can achieve a 'preferred' amount of CPU/IO on the host of their new instance. Resource sharing rules at the host level actually means that if everyone is trying to max out their instance, you would still get the equal share you are entitled to and guaranteed with your instance, so what the bad neighbor test really means is whether you can actually go into your neighbor's CPU allocation due to their under-use. Well, if everyone does that then the system degrades as someone has to a party using less than their allocation and the amount of instance spots that don't fail the 'bad neighbor test' become non existant. The overall health of the entire network would actually be better if folks didn't do this practice and instead everyone simply evened out their use across their instances that enjoy additional resources and stuck it out with the %age of their instances that only achieved their guaranteed minimum resource use and no more. My company uses another "cloud-like" vendor and although we don't perform 'bad neighbor' tests upon new instances, it is fair to say our application benefits from the fact that the majority of the instances on their network are under-utilized and we can push into the max CPU of the host beyond the limits we pay for. Where instances do share 'bad neighbors' (ie we can only get what we paid for and no more - boo hoo, etc) we still keep the instance but simply route around that and distribute less load than on other nodes in our network. That doesn't become the most cost effective mechanism, but the "savings" of the 'bad neighbor test' are probably negligible and ironically by not doing this we become the "good neighbors".
- jamesaguilar 14y agoActually, if the system is well-isolated and correctly subscribed, at worst you'll get exactly your reservation. It is not necessarily the case that someone has to lose.
- dotBen 14y agoRight. The problem is that a 'bad neighbor' test is often defined as when one can only get that guaranteed minimum amount of resource. That's the part that doesn't scale.