Amazon EC2 hosting,

[Etzion Bar-Noy]

A small note. I was led to understand (from a fried who uses EC2
and aggressively) that xlarge instances are (usually? Always? I think the
later) alone on physical hardware. So you would prefer to use xlarge
instance to prevent slowdowns.

Ez

2010/10/10 Maxim Veksler <maxim at vekslers.org>

> On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 5:04 PM, Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda <ladypine at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> 2010/10/10 Ori Idan <ori at helicontech.co.il>
>>
>>>
>>> 2010/10/10 Tom Rosenfeld <trosenfeld at gmail.com>
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>> I just came across this thread from back in Aug about Amazon's cloud.
>>>>
>>>> I'd like to add that I have been a satisfied customer of Amazon for over
>>>> a year, using their services for both consulting at at my current job where
>>>> we use it to run our SaaS offering. The capabilities keep improving and the
>>>> prices keep coming down. Their lowest end server is now just 2 cents an
>>>> hour!
>>>>
>>>> There are some issues with the IO, but it is certainly adequate for all
>>>> but high performance needs. We use 8 way stripped disks and get about 100
>>>> MBp/s sequential reads.
>>>>
>>>> If anyone wants more details, I'll be happy to share with you.
>>>>
>>>> -tom
>>>>
>>>>
>>> I am considering using EC2 for a web application.
>>> I am not sure how to calculate the payment per month.
>>> Do I pay only for the time someone makes a request?
>>> For example, I have a user who requests a certain report and it takes 1
>>> second to load the report request form, then 20 seconds to produce the
>>> report and print it.
>>> I understand that I pay for 21 seconds?
>>>
>>
>> In addition to mistakes already corrected, there is another mistake of how
>> long something takes. Amazon aim to provide a certain computation power
>> unit, but benchmarks show that what is actually provided has high
>> variability. For example, ping times to EC2 machines started rising
>> significantly since Amazon announces the spot instances. See also:
>>
>>
>
> Some more input on EC2.
>
> Not all instances born alike. We recently ran a huge computation based on
> Hadoop and you can definitely see that some nodes perform faster (I/O was
> the bottleneck) then others.
>
> I too, when starting with EC2 made the mistake to of thinking that you only
> pay for as much "CPU" as you use. Wrong!
>
> OTOH, I was very happy to find out that with Google AppEngine this is
> actually the case: You pay for as much resources as you consume. And they DO
> count "CPU Time" vs. Amazon's "instance is running time".
>
> Another note regarding EC2. Read bitbucket story about ec2 horrors
> http://blog.bitbucket.org/.
> Yet please don't get me wrong, generally EC2, S3, CloudFront, ELB and other
> Amazon's services work great - Our production farm (~40 servers is hosted
> there and we are relatively happy).
>
> Amazon's main issues are:
> I/O bandwidth is funny
> Occasionally peaks in connectivity time that lead to timeouts (between
> zones & from the outside world).
> Not so fair hypervisor: We've seen occasions when an instance "slows down"
> for a couple of minutes. We assume (without being able to tell for sure)
> that some bigger instance type that happen to be hosted on the same physical
> server as we are got resource hungry and practically ate all our CPU time...
>
>
> Maxim.
>
>
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