Re:How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
by snewman on Monday March 16, 2015 @06:46PM
(#9214994)
Can you walk me through a concrete example of cost savings? Every time I look at something like SoftLayer, it doesn't seem to offer much of a savings compared to a corresponding EC2 reserved instance. Sure, you can do way better than EC2 on-demand instances, but the reasonable comparison is to a reserved instance.
Re:How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware
by zaroth on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:25AM
(#9216563)
I think a big part of it is that dedicated metal and "reserved instances" are not apples-to-apples. You want absolute control, consistency, and customization of the build, you can buy/lease metal and co-locate it, or you can rent it from someone like SoftLayer, and you still don't ever have to walk into a data center.
1) The operational overhead is the same as Amazon. Actually I think it's less because everything is so predictable. Every machine we get has identical performance to any other. We still don't have to care about the exact same list of things that EC2 provided but we also don't have to care about weird cloud issues.
2) See above answer but also Softlayer are happy to provide actual support for any issues in a timely manner. In general everything has been much more reliable that you actually have to think less about High Availabilty technologies that make your stack more complex. In the years I've been using them we have only had a few hard disk failures that were replaced in around an hour and we just failed over to a replicated slave manually for around 2-3 minutes of downtime.
3) Resources are no more finite than EC2. The only difference is that the provisioning time is 1 hour rather than 1 minute. That has still been perfectly fine to respond to unexpected load events.
4) Absolutely
5) Also great.
People often compare Cloud Hosting with Colo. What they should compare cloud hosting with is renting servers. You get 95% of the benefits of cloud with none of the drawbacks.