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A comment on Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company. Parent comment

Re:Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conven... by LeifCarrotson on Thursday May 18, 2017 @01:55PM (#14369445)
On the other hand, a reserved m4.Large instance is $45/month. After a year of that, you're just $550 into hosting, barely enough to select and order the case and power supply for your server. It would be 30 years before you paid the cost of that Dell, so unless you actually need that power and your time is free, it's easier to let this be a tiny fraction of Amazon's expenses and workload than a big part of yours.
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Re:Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conven... by dxhdr on Thursday May 18, 2017 @02:30PM (#14369780)
The $15,000 Dell being discussed is equivalent to a m4.16xlarge with 64 threads and 256 gigs of RAM. The m4.large you're referencing at $45/mo only has 2 CPUs and 8 gigs of RAM.
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Re:Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conven... by nasalgoat on Thursday May 18, 2017 @03:46PM (#14370459)
Not all instances are the same. You can't run a database on an m4.large, not any database you plan on running queries on.

So you need that m4.16xlarge to handle the load, and honestly, there's no single instance available on Amazon that I've found that can come anywhere near the performance of physical hardware when it comes to handling database loads. Right now I am running ten r4.16xlarge instances to do the job of two Dell R710s, at considerably reduced performance even still.

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Re:Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conven... by LeifCarrotson on Thursday May 18, 2017 @06:05PM (#14371497)
I guess our use cases are just different. Mind sharing some examples of your use case that demands that much compute power?

I do run a database on my server (which isn't even a Large) for an e-commerce site. It fits handily in half a gig of ram. The hundreds of products we offer have associated images, but we just store the filenames in the database and they load from disk (or, more likely, Cloudflare cache). Honestly, it could be a static site but the database is a convenient way to edit the content and control the presentation.

You have 640 CPUs running at multiple gigahertz and trillions of bytes of RAM. What kind of workload requires that insane amount of compute power?

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Re:Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conven... by nasalgoat on Thursday May 18, 2017 @08:16PM (#14372118)
We have billions of rows of data and very complicated CTEs doing joins on a dozen tables matching based on GEOS radius data, and it's the primary query for our application. We're running PostgreSQL 9.5 and need to have all the data in memory for the fastest results.

Part of the problem is that the network disk that EC2 provides as EBS is 100x slower than local disk, so keeping all the indexes and data in memory is the only way to replicate physical hardware performance.

If anyone knows of a better EC2 setup for PostgreSQL, I'm all ears.

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Re:Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conven... by anarazel on Thursday May 18, 2017 @09:08PM (#14372341)
> Part of the problem is that the network disk that EC2 provides as EBS is 100x slower than local disk, so keeping all the indexes and data in memory is the only way to replicate physical hardware performance.

> If anyone knows of a better EC2 setup for PostgreSQL, I'm all ears.

Have a proper replication & archiving setup, and use instance storage. If you have configured streaming replication to 1-2 other servers, and archive your WAL to s3 (using wal-e or such), you're already above EBS's guarantees (99.9% durability IIRC?).

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Re:Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conven... by nasalgoat on Friday May 19, 2017 @10:27AM (#14375937)
Instance storage is much more limited and is heavily tied to the specific instance types you pick.
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Re:Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conven... by anarazel on Friday May 19, 2017 @01:18PM (#14377657)
Indeed. I didn't want to say it's a panacea, just that you can sometimes get a lot better performance for your money. E.g. larger i3's both have decent IO performance and sizes.

Still doesn't even remotely compete with what you can get with "normal" hardware.

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Re:Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conven... by shiftpgdn on Thursday May 18, 2017 @02:32PM (#14369788)
This is why I claim a hybrid model is the way to go. Your baseline/mean load should be on redundant dedicated hardware with spill-over into a cloud provider.
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