Amazon EC2 hosting, was: Dedicated hosting in the US

[Amos Shapira]

2010/8/12 Etzion Bar-Noy <ezaton at tournament.org.il>
>
> Amazon has experienced a set of performance problems recently. Their system is overly complicated, and, except for specific usage, I would recommend people to avoid.

Have you got reference to this claim?

We keep looking at "cloud" options for our servers and so far haven't
found anything which could guarantee disk IO SLA for us, enough to
relay our heavily disk-bound C++ programs on it.

We also used Amazon hosts for small testing projects and noticed that
they were noticebly more expensive than we first expected, even for
very small virtual servers.

All in all - I can't understand how SaaS companies manage to maintain
user experience on top of Amazon and the other clouds. I'm talking
about use-case examples from cloud services companies like rightscale
etc.

> Other "cloud" services exist, but still - the "cloud" is a buzzword which, translated to simple language is "you might have performance issues, and you have no means whatsoever of finding their source. You can guess, though". This sums up most of the cloud utilizations I have seen so far, which is, also, a funny way of saying "virtualization you do not maintain".

So far that's exactly our experience too. I'll just appreciate a
pointer to specific concrete examples so I can shoot it over to the
less technical people in the company who keep bugging me about using
the cloud to minimise costs and overheads (we currently rent a couple
of dozens of "traditional" dedicated 2xQuad-core servers and run our
own set of xen guests on them, at a cost of quite a few tens of
thousands of dollars per month).

Cheers,

--Amos