Amazon EC2 hosting, was: Dedicated hosting in the US

[Etzion Bar-Noy]

You could find tons of I/O related issues with Amazon by a simple google.

Check out this:
http://blog.dt.org/index.php/2010/06/amazon-ec2-io-performance-local-emphemeral-disks-vs-raid0-striped-ebs-volumes/


This is one attempt of a solution.

Clouds (SaaS) as it is now do not solve any problem. They introduce new
problems without solving the storage performance issues, which are the most
common problems.

Clouds are excellent for non-I/O intensive systems, especially if you have
the ability to fully distribute your application, and make it fully
redundant.

Ez

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 5:11 PM, Amos Shapira <amos.shapira at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/pipermail/linux-il/attachments/20100812/1c357337/attachment.html>