5 ms·

People use EC2 not because of price but flexibility. A good example: When we launch a product and expect lots of traffic, i can quadruple my server count in a

by adrr 13y ago

People use EC2 not because of price but flexibility. A good example: When we launch a product and expect lots of traffic, i can quadruple my server count in a few minutes. Once the event is over with, i can spin them down. I can't do this with traditional hosting.

jd007 13y ago
I agree with that but things are getting better. Providers like Internap exists now which has "instantly provisioned" dedicated hardware and a hosting API (http://www.internap.com/agile/ http://www.internap.com/agile/). I personally have not had experience with them but from I can see it seems to be good.
- j-kidd 13y ago
  The hybrid technology you mentioned came from Voxel, which was looking really good before the company was acquired by Internap. Now, it seems like the service has gone downhill: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1213599 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1213599
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
latch 13y ago
OP. I tried to address that in the post. I'm not sure how to explain it differently. The only reason you need to spin up more instances to handle the load is because of how slow the machines are in the first place. That $750 you spend on 2x m3-xlarges could get you machines that can handle 4x the load (or more). Under normal conditions, you spend $750/m. Under peak, you'll spend $3000/month with EC2 but still $750/m with dedicated (plus it's less to manage). Also in the post is that for the scenario you're describing, having dedicated servers handle the base traffic and relying on spot instances for the spikes, is much more cost effective.
- jd007 13y ago
  The main issue with the hybrid approach is devops cost. you will be basically dealing with two very different infrastructures, and building the ops for such a hybrid system could be costly (in money and time). Taking this into account, the money you save shrinks, In addition, a more complex system most likely has more parts to fail as well, so your total reliability might suffer somewhat as well. Another thing to take into account is inter-datacenter network reliability. I have personally ran a hybrid system (dedicated + EC2) before and suffered a routing issue. The upstream provider for the data center that my dedicated machines were in suffered a routing outage to EC2 US-East region (or at least to the AZs that my instances were in), and my EC2 web app servers could not connect to my DB for around 10 hours (during the day time too). If you have a hybrid system, during peak hours (where you have lots of EC2 spot instances serving traffic), networking issues could result in unexpected downtime. This is of course, in addition to the regular SLA downtime you get from either the dedicated provider or AWS, which is not an issue if you have everything hosted together, but could become an unavoidable problem if not.
  - dangrossman 13y ago
    Rackspace and Softlayer both have dedi/cloud hybrid offerings. You don't need to support multiple companies or multiple private networks to get the benefits. They still offer multiple datacenters for reliability.
    - jd007 13y ago
      I am aware of that but thanks for pointing it out explicitly for others. I was addressing more about the original article's suggesting of running a hybrid system of dedicated + EC2.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    My experience is that the devops cost drops: Most of the time you're dealing with a much simpler and more predictable dedicated environment - your challenges happen when you have to handle (rare) abnormal spikes. In terms of inter-datacenter network reliability: You have to deal with this if you want reliable hosting anyway. If you spread your database and app servers across data centers, yes, you are begging for problems and the problem is that your app is not designed for resilience. But you can easily enough do "hybrid" within the same datacenter, if you opt for any of the number of EC2 alternatives from companies that also do dedicated hosting.
vidarh 13y ago
You can get that flexibility without putting your base load on EC2: Use EC2 (or your "normal" hosts cloud services) to spin up extra servers when needed, and host your base load elsewhere. Extra bonus: It allows you to save even more money by flying closer to the wire with your long-term provisioned servers. These days there are so many hosts that offer combination of colo + dedicated servers + cloud services that you can seamlessly do both even if you don't want to deal with more than one provider.
- papsosouid 13y ago
  Right, I can just spin up EC2 instances which have to access my database in a whole different datacenter. That will certainly solve my problems!

by adrr 13y ago

jd007 13y ago

I agree with that but things are getting better. Providers like Internap exists now which has "instantly provisioned" dedicated hardware and a hosting API (http://www.internap.com/agile/ http://www.internap.com/agile/). I personally have not had experience with them but from I can see it seems to be good.

j-kidd 13y ago
The hybrid technology you mentioned came from Voxel, which was looking really good before the company was acquired by Internap. Now, it seems like the service has gone downhill: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1213599 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1213599

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

latch 13y ago

OP. I tried to address that in the post. I'm not sure how to explain it differently. The only reason you need to spin up more instances to handle the load is because of how slow the machines are in the first place. That $750 you spend on 2x m3-xlarges could get you machines that can handle 4x the load (or more). Under normal conditions, you spend $750/m. Under peak, you'll spend $3000/month with EC2 but still $750/m with dedicated (plus it's less to manage). Also in the post is that for the scenario you're describing, having dedicated servers handle the base traffic and relying on spot instances for the spikes, is much more cost effective.

jd007 13y ago
The main issue with the hybrid approach is devops cost. you will be basically dealing with two very different infrastructures, and building the ops for such a hybrid system could be costly (in money and time). Taking this into account, the money you save shrinks, In addition, a more complex system most likely has more parts to fail as well, so your total reliability might suffer somewhat as well. Another thing to take into account is inter-datacenter network reliability. I have personally ran a hybrid system (dedicated + EC2) before and suffered a routing issue. The upstream provider for the data center that my dedicated machines were in suffered a routing outage to EC2 US-East region (or at least to the AZs that my instances were in), and my EC2 web app servers could not connect to my DB for around 10 hours (during the day time too). If you have a hybrid system, during peak hours (where you have lots of EC2 spot instances serving traffic), networking issues could result in unexpected downtime. This is of course, in addition to the regular SLA downtime you get from either the dedicated provider or AWS, which is not an issue if you have everything hosted together, but could become an unavoidable problem if not.
- dangrossman 13y ago
  Rackspace and Softlayer both have dedi/cloud hybrid offerings. You don't need to support multiple companies or multiple private networks to get the benefits. They still offer multiple datacenters for reliability.
  - jd007 13y ago
    I am aware of that but thanks for pointing it out explicitly for others. I was addressing more about the original article's suggesting of running a hybrid system of dedicated + EC2.
- vidarh 13y ago
  My experience is that the devops cost drops: Most of the time you're dealing with a much simpler and more predictable dedicated environment - your challenges happen when you have to handle (rare) abnormal spikes. In terms of inter-datacenter network reliability: You have to deal with this if you want reliable hosting anyway. If you spread your database and app servers across data centers, yes, you are begging for problems and the problem is that your app is not designed for resilience. But you can easily enough do "hybrid" within the same datacenter, if you opt for any of the number of EC2 alternatives from companies that also do dedicated hosting.

vidarh 13y ago

You can get that flexibility without putting your base load on EC2: Use EC2 (or your "normal" hosts cloud services) to spin up extra servers when needed, and host your base load elsewhere. Extra bonus: It allows you to save even more money by flying closer to the wire with your long-term provisioned servers. These days there are so many hosts that offer combination of colo + dedicated servers + cloud services that you can seamlessly do both even if you don't want to deal with more than one provider.

papsosouid 13y ago
Right, I can just spin up EC2 instances which have to access my database in a whole different datacenter. That will certainly solve my problems!