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by meskyanichi 5097 days ago
^ This. You'll do it if you care enough or if it's absolutely required. Everyone knows in advance that this kind of shit can and will happen. Also, if people don't plan on hosting in multiple areas/AZs, I wonder why the hell anyone would even consider overpriced cloud technology while you can get practically 5 powerful dedicated servers for the same price, except that it's more performant than a shitty VM on EC2. That said, if you have 5 dedicated servers, why even bother with EC2? It's more expensive in every way. "Pay more as you grow" is actually extremely expensive for what you actually get. Infinite scalability? Please. When people think about scalability, they think about adding a few gigs of ram to their VM with a little more I/O throughput (e.g. migrating from VM1 to VM2) for hundreds of dollars, and it's still shitty VM performance compared to raw metal. Instead, why not spend that money on a few good dedicated boxes with 96-128gb+ ram and a bunch of true (not virtual) CPU cores, then you're done for a while, and for the same price. Hardware is dirt cheap these days.

The only useful/sane use case I can see in Amazon EC2 would be for services like Heroku where they need to automatically be able to manage a truckload of VM's as their rapidly growing infrastructure, unless you want to do it yourself which I imagine is quite a headache unless you work closely with someone like Amazon or Rackspace.

1 comments

The "scalability" thing isnt about adding some ram or getting a larger proc. It's about adding a few dozen (or hundred) instances in minutes. Or getting hosts turned up in 7 different regions. Anyone can do that right now with AWS, let me know how your Equinox negotiations go for the next month.

Yes white boxes are cheap. Site negotiations, design, procurement, networking, operations, and maintenance are expensive in dollars and time. Personally I run "a bunch" of physical sites across the globe. It would be waaaay easier to be able to turn up rackspace/aws/google instances as needed.

> The "scalability" thing isnt about adding some ram or getting a larger proc.

You'd be surprised how many people that actually use EC2 think it is.

> Yes white boxes are cheap. Site negotiations, design, procurement, networking, operations, and maintenance are expensive in dollars and time.

It's called planning ahead of time. If not, then here's a suggestion: Use EC2 until you set it up and migrate, if you cannot wait that is.

All in all I don't mind whether people use EC2 for whatever reason. Just stating my opinion. I agree of course that in terms of "convenience" is has the upper hand. Not having to wait for boxes to be added to data centers, being able to spin up boxes in multiple regions through a single company/console. Maybe your use case does justify using EC2. Many other people clearly do not (hence all the whining because of all the downtime, which they wouldn't have had if they deployed to multiple AZs/Regions).

> let me know how your Equinox negotiations go for the next month.

How do cloud services compare to a gym membership? Are you implying you can't get out of your AWS contract?

Sigh, I blame auto correct. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinix