Yes, Linode beats AWS when it comes to price. On the other hand, Linode's offer is incredibly basic and simplistic. AWS offers service after service that Linode simply doesn't and realistically cannot.
Sure, you can emulate a subset of these services (and a subset of their features) using open-source software but at what price ? That's the major flaw in your reasoning. Getting to the point where your installations are as stable and reliable as AWS', given a large stress on the system, will cost you a lot of money and time. Directly comparing the cost of hardware access is ignoring other costs and headaches that are not very easy to estimate.
There's a market for a service like Linode and there's a market for a service like AWS. You've simply never worked on a project/system that works better on AWS than on Linode. I know I couldn't run the systems that I currently operate on Linode without multiplying the workload that is needed to maintain them.
Linode and AWS are competitors but there's space in the market for both; they simply fill different niches. Establishing one as absolutely superior to the other is silly and closed-minded. A lot of people chose AWS; go and ask them why (feel free to reach out to me at nick at nasx dot io - I'll be more than happy to talk to you).
If we keep attacking the people for their honest disclosures, we're only discouraging them from expressing their conflict of interest in the future. Please. Don't.
Using locust.io, I've seen that my current site on two $10/month Linodes can scale up to approximately 300k people/day and increasing that substantially just means I press a button and upgrade my app/database servers.
If it came to a point where I was growing at a pace I didn't want to manage and money was flowing in, and I was out of ideas on software optimization, only then I would consider spending tens of thousands/month on AWS.
I'm not denying the great benefits AWS gives, I honestly would love to use it now and just be done with most of my devop headaches, but the costs are prohibitive.
Picture a continuum between brain-dead simple websites and business-critical complex websites:
simple: static website, WordPress blog
moderate: small business CMS, etc
complex: Netflix, AirBNB
On the other end of the spectrum, you want to run a high-availability website with failover across multiple regions like Netflix. You need the value-added "services" of a comprehensive cloud provider (the "I" and "S" in "IaaS" as in "Infrastructure Services"). For that scenario, there are currently 4 big competitors: AWS, MS Azure, Google Compute Cloud, and IBM SoftLayer. However, many observers see that Google and IBM are not keeping pace with AWS and Azure on features so at the moment, it's more of a 2 horse race than a 4.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of cost comparisons showing AWS to be overpriced are based on comparing Amazon's EC2 vs bare metal. The EC2 component is a small part of the complete AWS portfolio.[1] If you're doing more complicated websites, you have to include the costs of Linux admins + devops programmers to reinvent what AWS has out of the box. (The non-EC2 services.) Even if you use OpenStack as a baseline for a "homegrown AWS", you'll still need extensive staffing to configure and customize it for your needs. It may very well turn out that homegrown on Linode is cheaper but most articles on the web do not have quality cost analysis on the more complicated business scenarios. Anecdotes yes! But comprehensive unbiased spreadsheets with realistic cost comparisons?!? No.
I use it for dev / early projects and as things get complex or need more redundancy I make the production spend on AWS.
Just saying that calling 90% of Google Cloud's products to be far better than AWS (or any equivalent provider for that matter) is bold.
And no the ability to run it yourself on Google is not the same.
Here's a material answer - https://cloud.google.com/docs/google-cloud-platform-for-aws-...
In short, Google has parity with AWS on many fronts, and exceeds AWS on many others. Only material AWS advantage at this point is full IAM. Biggest thing you gotta remember is AWS is stuck in "VM" world and only slightly deviates from that. Google's advantage is in its fully managed services, which AWS does poorly (don't tell me Redshift is "fully managed").
Google has Bigtable, which AWS has no competitor for. Google's Pubsub is vastly superior to SQS. Google doesn't need Firehose because Google's services scale to Firehose levels without needing a new product and a new price. Google has Zync transcoder service.
Google has BigQuery, which is vastly superior to Redshift in price, performance, scale, and manageability. Google has Dataflow, which AWS has no competitor for.
Even for VMs, Google offers better networking, faster disks, more reliability (live migration), better load balancer, etc.
And to put the cherry on top, Google's no-committment, no-contract price is only beat if you lock yourself into AWS's 3-year contract.
(disclaimer: work on BigQuery)
You know what would be a cool idea: if Google developed a method of copying an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to Google Cloud. That would give us an easy way to try out our same servers at Google without having to rebuild everything, as we do not use containers yet.
I think the net cost of an extra personnel (a server admin) in a startup team, is more than the cost of the server.
If anything, I see a lot of people choose AWS for 'scalability' concerns when they never end up needing to scale.
Main advantages I see is Security - aws has security zones, FW ETC FOR FREE Momentum - constant new features(apache spark, lambda, sqs)
The only points you even remotely bring up are vague and wishy-washy and could easily be applied to any statement, even outside of programming.
I consult / contract for a Fortune 50 customer that pays an insane amount of money to AWS per month and it seems ridiculous what they're paying for and what they get. But do you know what's even more ridiculous? Paying three times as much but getting even worse reliability and a massive amount of time wasted while waiting weeks to provision servers. One group internally used to have massive outages daily resulting in needing to hire a dedicated team of about 6 just to handle that load of production incidents (terrible reliability also resulting in loss of revenue too) and since migrating their software with even the most bone-headed SPF-everywhere AWS based software architecture haven't had more than one or two per week for outages now. The cost benefits get better the more incompetent / incapable your internal IT organization is. The amount of wasted resources due to internal bureaucracy, legacy, and working with companies that don't really practice any form of technology at scale has been an incredible amount of savings for my customer.
And knowing how much my customer relies upon AWS support for the most menial of tasks (primarily a cultural thing with how they treat their vendors as well as internal resources) I am sure that nobody but massive companies that deal with external bureaucracies effectively could deliver the size and kind of support team to handle the volume of support requests generated by my customer for the most ridiculous of tasks (I've seen executives file AWS support requests to reboot VMs at 3 am because the bureaucracy is extremely brittle here and reflects into the software systems reliability). We may throw millions / month at AWS, but Amazon has to hire at least a few dozen engineers and several account managers just to handle support alone which I might argue could be a net loss to handle the customer.
Most vendors that work with my customer have a very hard time working with them because they approach sourcing quite similar to how Walmart does and abuses them to the point where the vendors abuse their employees.
Isn't this falls outside amazon's responsibly area?
Atleast the documentation I read and a few aws promotional talks I attended seems to suggest the contrary.
Or I have understood completely wrong and amazon is now also providing managed IT services?
But when you pay AWS so much they are pretty beholden to your requests and can wind up becoming a lot like an MSP. I've spent countless hours with those poor guys waiting on a traceroute failure or for mtr or sat to give some anomalous event that everyone suspects is something wrong in AWS when I've insisted AWS is almost never at fault because our incompetence is almost certainly the problem.
The AWS support team's worst engineer is probably at least in the top 25% of our support engineers I'd argue so I'm sure if my customer had the option they'd want to pay to have them troubleshoot our own internal networks but that's what my team is for I guess.
Yes. There will always be a less stupid solution out there that is not as bad as the bad solution.
Or, you could fix IT. But that takes thought.
Easier to give money to a vendor you can blame...?
In a lot of pathologically-managed companies or divisions, there is effectively zero chance of an employee being able changing the pathology.
- It is too hard to figure out that you offer hourly billing, I found it by accident, and a year too late.
- I tried out your Nodebalancers, as I thought they would be a nice help for my stack, but I ended up building my own Haproxy solution since the performance wasn't good. When I pay for a dedicated loadbalancers, I would expect it to be top-tuned from your side.
- Your API is a mess, and so is your documentation. Everything is GET-requests. And creating a new instance, shouldn't take 11 requests, and a dance to set every little detail correctly. And to be fair, your documentation doesn't even document that, this is a subset of what I use: https://gist.github.com/kaspergrubbe/756f0a227db8aeb92818 I even managed to find some errors in the documentation when I went through it, so it didn't feel very polished or tested, but maybe it isn't used a lot. It also seems strange that to emulate one or two clicks in the interface, needs 11 requests through the API.
- Your advanced settings are extremely hard to find, especially "Edit Configuration Profile" and the "Auto-configure Networking"
- Elastic IPs. I feel like it should be easier to swap IPs around Linodes, without me using heartbeatd, and some strange configs. This is much easier with Amazon, and one of the reason why I prefer them.
- Anycast routing. Linode has several datacenters, it would be awesome if my setup in the US could have the same IP as my setup in the UK, because right now I am doing ugly DNS hacks to send my customers to the closest datacenter. Is this planned?
- Lack of an object store, even though I use Linode, I am still using AWS S3, which means added latency, and I have to pay Amazon for outside traffic, you can't even compare with AWS on these things without starting to have these things.
Can I setup a Linode through the API with private networking enabled?
I am a happy customer, and I loved your KVM upgrade, I love your prices, and I love your service. But it would be nice to see more innovations happening.
> It is too hard to figure out that you offer hourly billing, I found it by accident, and a year too late.
It's still a pretty new feature, only about 18 months old, and their price sheet has clearly listed e.g. ".06/hr to $40/mo" for quite a while now. I vaguely remember getting an email and seeing a blog post about it when it was announced...
> When I pay for a dedicated loadbalancers, I would expect it to be top-tuned from your side.
I think it is top-tuned, but only on $20/month worth of hardware and networking. ;-) They explicitly say in some blog posts to add more NB and scale out if you need more concurrent connections. I agree that this is a little alarming, and I'd be willing to pay more for beefier NBs—just like I do with regular nodes. Building out your own HAproxy nodes is a fine solution and what I plan to do if this becomes an issue for us.
> Your API is a mess... It also seems strange that to emulate one or two clicks in the interface, needs 11 requests through the API.
It's not the greatest API in the history of computers but it gets the job done and I found the documentation to be more than adequate. It's bare-bones and you're going to want an abstraction over it, whether you write your own (like I did), use their CLI, or use Salt or Knife or what have you. Whether it's one API call or 100 doesn't matter if all you have to do on a regular basis is `linode-create foo` or `ansible-playbook create-linode.yml bar`.
Anyway, I just ran through a quick build using the web interface and it takes like 10+ clicks to build a node with the default disks, no private interface, no label, no forward or reverse DNS, not booted, etc. For this to take four API calls to allocate the node, create root and swap volumes, and build the config doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Tack on another four API calls to set the label and display group, set the DNS, add a private IP, and boot the node. I'm not seeing the problem here.
> Lack of an object store
I mean, sure, Linode lacks a lot of the things that AWS provides. They also don't provide a database aaS or a queue aaS or a CDN aaS or... you get the idea. I don't think they're trying to compete with Amazon at this level. Where do you draw the line between IaaS and PaaS? Can you implement your own object store using some open source software just like you run your own HAproxy and database instances?
> Can I setup a Linode through the API with private networking enabled?
Yes, but it's a separate API call. :-) https://www.linode.com/api/linode/linode.ip.addprivate
> I am a happy customer, and I loved your KVM upgrade, I love your prices, and I love your service. But it would be nice to see more innovations happening.
Agreed on all points. My innovation wishlist includes VPC (I really just want my own private VLAN) and more flexible node configurations (another commentor mentioned that you can't add disk without adding CPU and RAM—and vice-versa—and this is a huge pain point). I haven't had to deal (yet) with IP swapping and anycast but I can see those becoming issues for us in the future. And I actually do agree that Linode should implement some kind of a object store to compete with S3... I would categorize that as IaaS, not PaaS, and it's the most glaring hole in Linode's offering right now.
If you are going to end up re-building AWS's services from scratch on top of what are essentially naked linux machines (or doing your integration work between services from many vendors), you are doing a huge amount of work that isn't necessary and will be a lot more expensive than that $20k/ month you could have been paying to Amazon.
Aren't there tools that can provide a similarly high level/seamless/polished experience running on your own computer, using your choice of cloud provider as the backend? If not, why not?
(I wouldn't know - I don't even run a website, and if I did, I would avoid the locked-in services like the plague, out of principle. But I'm curious.)
No, you need many more than that. AWS's offerings are complex systems, each backed by multiple large teams of developers and operations people. And that's not just because they have tons of customers.
You want to run a partitioned, replicated data store with five nines of reliability? Good luck doing even just that with two people. Throw in metrics (CloudWatch), a queuing system (SQS), monitoring/failover with on-demand provisioning (EC2 + auto scaling groups), and you're talking a lot more than just two devops people... well, unless you want them both on-call 24/7/365, and you want them to burn out in a matter of weeks.
AWS isn't perfect by any means, and you can certainly argue that it can be overpriced... but maybe you pick and choose, and use AWS for the things you don't have expertise in or time for, and roll your own for the rest. The nice thing is that AWS lets you offload all that stuff when you're small and don't want to or can't retain that kind of expertise in-house, and then you can focus on actually building your awesome product that runs on AWS's plumbing. And when you have more time and people later, you can look into doing things differently to save money, piece by piece, when it makes sense to do so.
1. The "Bus Factor" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
2. Context switching - if you have a developer that also works on coding or other things.
So maybe it's not a full $240k/year for only 1 service, but the price in the door IS that. 2 to 3 extra services will cost no more - that's where AWS will make the money.
At scale, the arguments about needing 10 admins vs needing 15, for example, start making sense.
This covers not just running the services, but keeping up to date with security updates, scaling the systems, feature additions, bug fixes and keeping up with the state of the art.
Services like RDS are an amazing net cost saving for small to medium users. Something like Cloudfront would cost you a million just to get going. Raw EC2 is nearer break even.
We've used CDNs in the past, way below a million/year for a medium, growing startup. care to elaborate?
I'm involved in two different startups, one on Linode (because that's all it can afford) and the other on AWS. For it's current offering, Linode is great for MVPs, and you like your servers as pets, but it's doubtful we'd stay with Linode once we start having to scale.
This is fundamentally not understanding what AWS is.
- You could say "EC2 is just Xen". But next time there is a 0-day exploit, I'll have AWS working all weekend to patch my servers. And Xen still doesn't have an API for scaling physical hardware..
- You could say "S3 is just Apache". But I will never see a "disk full" message, I will never get paged if something is borked (but it will still get fixed), I will never worry about DDOS attacks, etc.
> Once you implement it yourself on Linux, the ongoing cost drops.
That's like saying "it's cheaper if you change your own oil". Might be true, but doesn't matter. I'm still taking my car in. Lots of other people do. You might try asking them why.
Outsource if you want. When your bill hits $500k/mo and you realize you're paying for things you can do yourself, your position may change.
Have you been through an AWS outage and been paged? It happens. When you realize your business depends on an opaque organization you may want to diversify.
If you're small it makes sense to outsource sometimes. Not always and not forever.
I'm using them in prod already, and trying to create a similar setup on real hardware for enterprise customers using pg, pgpool2 and haproxy is already a pain, and yet you couldn't autorecover them as conveniently when they go belly up.
We are using MySQL RDS, but are migrating to self-managed Cassandra. We use RabbitMQ instead of SQS. We use Hive/Presto instead of Redshift.
The key point is, running those things yourself, you are likely to lose all the nice failover mechanisms/monitoring/auto-snapshotting stuff that AWS offers. To live up to that, it will require you to not only have extensive understanding of the software you are running, but also a considerable amount of your time will be dedicated to Ops side, which can lead to some really big frustration from time to time. In that sense, I don't think you can re-IMPLEMENT something by assuming too much of comprises.
So my suggestion is for a small-non critical projects you can use Linode, but for anything serious you better use something that is reliable.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your analysis is incomplete.
That's more than enough reason for serious customers to avoid Linode...
I just did this migration (non-AWS -> AWS), and we saw a ~20% reduction in monthly prices with 1-year contract at AWS vs. physical hosting (admittedly we were getting terrible pricing with our physical hosts, but still). This will be reduced with the addition of t2.nano servers as we run enough t2.micro instances for little odds and ends that it will put a dent in the bill.
Still, I agree with the parent's general sentiment re price. The gap used to be much worse, but it's still anywhere from 2x-20x depending on what you're doing.
- EC2 prices are simply high and exclude things like bandwidth.
- The CPUs are usually 1-3 generations behind (they've gotten better with this).
- Virtualization adds overhead (again, this can be very significant if you're doing a lot of system calls)
- IO options are significantly worse
- Their network connectivity is, at best, average
You said it yourself, you're comparing a "terrible" deal to AWS and only saved 20%. Sounds to me like AWS is only 20% better than terrible ;)
On your points about AWS itself I'm not going to argue with as they certainly are valid, however in my specific setup (everything production is c4/r3 types, 1tb gp2 volumes as all volumes, and running network benchmarks to ensure everything is properly sized) I've actually had a pretty big performance gain over dedicated servers in a DMZ behind a hardware firewall.
With regards to the bandwidth, it seems a common issue is when you have very chatty services (Apache Kafka) deployed across multiple AZ's the bill gets real big real fast. Thus far, we're not even cracking 3-digits in bandwidth monthly. Maybe we're simply not at a scale to notice these problems yet.
- Can Linode offer short-term compute or memory intensive service? e.g., If I want to consume 100 teraflops 24x7 for about a couple weeks, or maybe 10 teraflops but a terabyte of memory. (Pay-as-you-go, not monthly/yearly subscription)
- On top of that, Can I do above with my IPython notebook code, which is already setup (it uses numpy at the backend so python slowdown is not a problem), with a step-by-step process of how to make it run on Linode (without having to install python scientific stack)?
These are some of the use cases that I think are getting popular these days, and for which AWS is known for, e.g., in the areas of machine learning, 3D rendering, etc.
Their service limits start low and ratchet slowly, if they have the capacity to give.
All these features and elasticity sound nice until you get big and they don't deliver.
I don't know what an AWS TAM is but the SAs have tried and failed.
Make a new account and try to run 1000 c4.4xl in parallel for 1 hour. It won't happen.
That's not what happened the five times, but it's illustrative.
And who defines what is a need and what is a want?
We currently use a mixture of root servers (DB) and VPS (App, HAProxy, NGinx) at a hoster.
* We use a Docker/Consul/Nomad/SaltStack setup to install new servers for replacing broken ones and growth
* App setup is Redis/Disque, Postgres(DB, BI) and app servers
* New dedicated servers we get in around 1h, VPS in around 1min (Only VPS over API)
* We have around 0.2 Ops FTE (devs rollout apps, ops for security updates, new infrastructure etc. and incidents)
* Price seems to be way below Amazon
With all those things that you have in place, AWS would not be a big win for you, though you still might find some use of AWS services like S3 for reliable object storage, Route53 for DNS, or Lambda for "server-free" event handling. The unique thing about AWS is the huge portfolio of services they have and the absolutely amazing rate at which they manage to pump out new (and useful!) ones.
The Salt is of the shelf, with some bash scripts on top to auto generate some config and make installation of a new server one script call.
We surely could put endless hours into Ops, playing around with stuff etc. but the benefit would be marginal.
Our DNS setup is simple, not much to say, we use DNS Made Easy for failover, we use S3 though I do not consider it "AWS" (S3 is comparativly cheap).
I've wondered about Mesosphere with autoscaling etc. but with adding a new VPS in seconds setting up Mesosphere/Kubernetes taking two weeks would take quite some time to amortize.
Cloudwatch, SQS, SNS, Dynamo, S3 etc offer good managed services that you can plug into your applications/systems with not that much effort - and crucially very little OPS needed.
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/
I see your characterization of AWS above as "terrible", but I'm curious how that squares with the (probably very well-informed) decisions these people made to use AWS.
- Know how to maintain a server by yourself
- Hire someone who can
AWS removes part of that and thus people pay for it. An average (good enough) sys admin costs the same as a programmer.
Reply by kawsper to your comment highlights several drawbacks of Linode. Specifically this feedback "Your API is a mess, and so is your documentation. Everything is GET-requests. And creating a new instance, shouldn't take 11 requests" alone, if true, is sufficient for me to not consider Linode for hosting. As being in an ultra small team of 2, we can't afford the luxury of API requests failing so many times.
Having used AWS since 2010, and since 2007 for backups(s3), I can say that your comparison $20,000 in AWS vs $250 is wrong. Have you assumed a very foolish selection by a user? Where in a user will just pick up all their services (e.g. RDS for a DB, etc.)
Just as a fact, we don't use RDS but install MySql by ourselves as it allows us to have other things on that instance, and also comes out cheap in comparison. On this note my contribution to the OP (article) would have been bundle different services on an instance, rather than buying stereotyped instances. Of course YMMV.
The biggest advantage is for ultra small teams, where you have comfort of a stable environment, with respect to instances launching; APIs working; volumes getting attached/unattached; snapshots getting taken; backups done on s3. All taking place automatically, while you rest peacefully.
I am not arguing that apples to apples Linode (or some other service) will not be cheaper than AWS. I am sure it will be. But still many people would like to stick with AWS because of stability and maturity of its cloud.
Also you got to give credit to AWS for pioneering hourly billing, and disrupting the cloud environment. Despite agreeing with you mainly on the cheaper point, when I moved to AWS from dedicated hosting in 2010, my monthly bills reduced.
Lastly. The experimentation. The wide variety of instances it has from micro (to the recently launched nano) to ultra large instances, allow you to experiment a lot. For example: in the past few months: I moved from couple m3.large to couple c4.xlarge, while experimenting in between on c3.xlarge type of instances.
Finally, when you make such a blanket statement, you not only demonstrate your naivete but also undermine the decisions of thousands of satisfied AWS users.
All said, I would like you (Linode) and others to be a good alternative. I am glad you are there. This is to keep AWS on its toes. Which is in my interest as their customer.
PS: Lest my handle makes someone think, I represent AWS. Please be assured I do not. I just created this handle, when I had to ask an AWS specific question (you can check my first post in this handle). And then continued with it for other things.
Edit: minor correction
Really? I didn't get that at all.
What I saw was a post giving negative opinions on various aspects of AWS, and stating that AWS' offerings are available elsewhere. There was an example given, of a previous project where he'd switched away from AWS to dedicated physical servers (at an unnamed provider). There was no suspicious boosterism/puffery in the direction of his own employer, like you generally see when a shill is trying to get away with something.
In fact, it seems like the only real mention he made of linode was in the disclosure that he kindly added, pointing out that he worked there and was therefore biased. Most ads don't bother to do that.
If this counts as an ad, then by those standards nobody could ever post in any thread covering the industry in which they work.
http://wptavern.com/linode-confirms-data-security-breach-tha...
Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even before I started at Linode, I thought it was terrible. It's extremely, unreasonably pricey. The UI is terrible. Their offerings are availble elsewhere. I started MediaCrush, a now-defunct media hosting website, on AWS. After a while, we switched to dedicated hosting (really sexy servers). We were looking at $250 a month and scaled up to millions of visitors per day! I ran our bandwidth and CPU usage and such numbers through the AWS price calculator a while ago - over $20,000 per month. AWS is a racket. It seems to me like the easiest way to burn through your new startup's seed money real fast.
Edit: not trying to sell you on Linode, just disclosing that I work there. There are lots of options, just do the research before you reach for AWS.