4 ms·

DO'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.

by seldo 13y ago

grosbisou 13y ago
What's wrong with EBS? And for what usage?
- seldo 13y ago
  http://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 ago
  Most 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 ago
    From what I've seen/heard/experienced, Provisioned IOPS largely addressed the issues with inconsistent performance.
    - rpedela 13y ago
      Yes but it is very expensive.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Only use EBS when you absolutely have to, and fail gracefully when EBS fails.
- copergi 13y ago
  It 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 ago
How do you even do anything without using EBS?
- ghotli 13y ago
  Well, 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 ago
    And you do what for loadbalancing?
    - ceejayoz 13y ago
      IIRC, Amazon has been working on removing the ELB dependence on EBS. I haven't seen an announcement of them being done, though.
    - ghotli 13y ago
      If 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 ago
  Exactly - 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.

DO'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.

by seldo 13y ago

DO'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 ago

What's wrong with EBS? And for what usage?

seldo 13y ago
http://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 ago
Most 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 ago
  From what I've seen/heard/experienced, Provisioned IOPS largely addressed the issues with inconsistent performance.
  - rpedela 13y ago
    Yes but it is very expensive.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  Only use EBS when you absolutely have to, and fail gracefully when EBS fails.
copergi 13y ago
It 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 ago

How do you even do anything without using EBS?

ghotli 13y ago
Well, 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 ago
  And you do what for loadbalancing?
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    IIRC, Amazon has been working on removing the ELB dependence on EBS. I haven't seen an announcement of them being done, though.
  - ghotli 13y ago
    If 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 ago
Exactly - 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.