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Just out of curiosity, why would one choose AWS over Digital Ocean? Isn't DO considerably cheaper?
by j-rom 13y ago
Just out of curiosity, why would one choose AWS over Digital Ocean? Isn't DO considerably cheaper?
- toomuchtodo 13y agoService ecosystem (S3, RDS, SQS, VPCs, Cloudsearch, Elastic Transcoder, to name a few), long-term stability, reliability, support, the ability to peer directly with AWS to name a few.
- seldo 13y agoDO's "internal" networking/security group support is still immature. I use DO for personal stuff, but at work we use AWS. Just never EBS. Ever.
- grosbisou 13y agoWhat's wrong with EBS? And for what usage?
- seldo 13y agohttp://blog.awe.sm/2012/12/18/aws-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/#~ozDTEFkXkMAR1E http://blog.awe.sm/2012/12/18/aws-the-good-the-bad-and-the-u... TLDR: it's okay for backups, but in critical path it's a world of sadness. Failure modes are too painful.
- rpedela 13y agoMost of AWS's major outages have been related to EBS. Although outages can happen to any hosting provider, and I am sure they have fixed the previous issues. So EBS should get more stable over time and it is already quite stable. The performance of EBS is pretty bad, and getting decent performance is expensive. Having said that, if your application runs in memory and disk usage is infrequent then it is probably fine to use EBS. EBS is also much more expensive than the instance storage, but it is also durable unlike instance storage. On the whole, "never ever EBS" is too strong language making it incorrect. As usual, it depends.
- mikebabineau 13y agoFrom what I've seen/heard/experienced, Provisioned IOPS largely addressed the issues with inconsistent performance.
- rpedela 13y agoYes but it is very expensive.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoOnly use EBS when you absolutely have to, and fail gracefully when EBS fails.
- copergi 13y agoIt went down in 2012 and somehow rather than get the correct idea from that (everything breaks) people took this bizarre notion that EBS is bad and everything else has perfect reliability. In reality, tons of other AWS services run on top of EBS, including load balancers. When EBS fails again, the people thinking they are avoiding it will still have outages.
- copergi 13y agoHow do you even do anything without using EBS?
- ghotli 13y agoWell, you break your services out onto stateless and stateful machines. After that, you make sure that each of your stateful services is resilient to individual node failure. I prefer to believe that if you can't roll your entire infrastructure over to new nodes monthly then you're unprepared for the eventual outage of a stateful service. Most databases have replication but you need to make sure that the characteristics of how the database handles a node failure are well understood. Worst case you use EBS, put your state on it, snapshot it regularly, and ship those snapshots to another region because when EBS fails it fails hard. Also, logs make every machine stateful. Use something like logstash to centralize that state.
- copergi 13y agoAnd you do what for loadbalancing?
- ceejayoz 13y agoIIRC, Amazon has been working on removing the ELB dependence on EBS. I haven't seen an announcement of them being done, though.
- ghotli 13y agoIf ELB is down in a given region then DNS failover to another region. Assuming you feel comfortable rolling your entire infrastructure monthly, have good images / configuration management, and have the state replicated in the backup region. That or sidestep ELB in your region to a team of stateless load balancers that terminate SSL.
- atonse 13y agoExactly - how can I run a database server without EBS?
- ayushgta 13y ago> Just never EBS. Ever. I wouldn't take it that far! There is conflicting information on which between Standard EBS and Instance store performs better but there have been benchmarks to support that EBS does perform more consistently than instance store (example: http://serverfault.com/questions/111594/which-is-faster-for-read-access-on-ec2-local-drive-or-ebs http://serverfault.com/questions/111594/which-is-faster-for-...). Also, you can now launch EBS optimized instances which use a network stack intended to separate EBS I/O giving better throughput. iops is expensive but is great to have when you need it. Sure, if EBS goes down in your zone, you're hosed. But unless you're completely independent as a service, chances are you do depend on something which uses EBS so you might be hosed anyways. Instance store is great free storage to use. Since it needs to be mounted explicitly, I'm guessing that most people don't end up using it. Thats a shame too; so use that free storage but EBS isn't evil either.
- tzaman 13y agoWith Digital Ocean, you only get almost bare VPS hosting (which is not bad per-se, I use them for a couple of personal projects), as with AWS, I get 1-click solution for pretty much anything I need, from S3 and Cloudfront, to Elasticache, hosted PostgreSQL, Route 53, OpsWorks, and numberous others.
- dataminded 13y agoDO is great for hacking on personal projects. I prefer AWS for work stuff because firewall, security groups and networking are much easier to manage. I have not yet tried GCE but I may move some of my dev stuff over once they roll out the private git repos.
- skj 13y agoThe private git repos rolled out a while ago. https://source.developers.google.com/p/PROJECT/r/default https://source.developers.google.com/p/PROJECT/r/default You might have to turn it on in your developer console, not sure. At the moment, pushing to its "master" branch tries to deploy to app engine, so that might not be what you're looking for. You can clone it (and, in the future, your connected repos and other Google-hosted repos) with 'gcloud init PROJECT', and things should work nicely.
- dataminded 13y agoThanks! I searched but couldn't find this yesterday.
- nivertech 13y agoCan you use this as a replacement for Github private repos?
- skj 13y agoIt really depends on what you mean. It is a private git repo, so in that sense yes.
- joevandyk 13y agoDigital Ocean isn't PCI compliant. http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/3715574-pci-compliance http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea... AWS is.
- rodgerd 13y agoTooling. I find it bizarre that Amazon put so much effort into pushing the idea theat their killer feature is price. Plenty of people outflank them on price. What's best about Amazon it their tooling. They have hands-down better tooling than their competition. I use gandi for my personal stuff (because I'm less bothered by the French government spying on me than the US one) and it's much cheaper than Amazon. But in terms of being able to easily mass-manage a complex environment? Not even close. DO? Don't make me laugh.
- toast0 13y ago> I find it bizarre that Amazon put so much effort into pushing the idea theat their killer feature is price. Plenty of people outflank them on price. This is the Southwest Airlines model. Tell everyone you're great on price often enough, even if it's not always true, and plenty of people will think you're good on price.
- jread 13y agoThe EC2 C3 instance type is going to be about the same price as DO for 1 year reserve and less than DO for 3 year. Spot pricing will also be lower than DO for C3s. On top of that EC2 is far superior to DO in many ways: EBS off instance storage (DO is local storage only), volume snapshots, IPv6, load balancing, private IPs, multiple IPv4 addresses, 8 data centers globally, firewalls, VPN, VPC, PCI DSS compliance, companion services like S3/CloudFront/Route 53 and much higher default quotas just to mention a few. DO is essentially a VPS with utility pricing.