Slashdot Mirror
Amazon EC2 May Be Experiencing Growing Pains
1sockchuck writes "Some developers using Amazon EC2 are wondering aloud whether the popularity of the cloud computing service is beginning to affect its performance. Amazon this week denied speculation that it was experiencing capacity problems after a veteran developer reported performance issues and suggested that EC2 might be oversubscribed. Meanwhile, a cloud monitoring service published charts showing increased latency on EC2 in recent weeks. The reports follow an incident over the holidays in which a DDoS on a DNS provider slowed Amazon's retail and cloud operations."
Why not say "Yes, we're way too popular. We're adding capacity as quickly as we can, but people are just lapping up our service!"
This seems like a missed marketing opportunity.
The ______ Agenda
When the news came around for EC2's DDoS around Christmas, I remembered reading how Amazon began offering their services to third parties in the first place. Turns out Amazon has a sudden peak of traffic around shopping holidays and particularly Christmas.
To prepare for that, they have added enough hardware to handle the peak, but that hardware went unused the rest of the year. So they started leasing it to third parties in the form of their web services.
This immediately makes you think, ok, what happens to their ability to handle the third party apps around Christmas, when they need a lot more hardware to handle Amazon.com's traffic itself? And then this DDoS happened, which importantly overloaded not the actual app servers, but the DNS servers pointing to the app servers. So as a result the app servers experiences lower traffic for third party sites than they would have otherwise.
It's making me think, and this is of course just speculation, this may have possibly not be a genuine attack as much as a stunt to lessen the overload of their cloud services they knew they'd experience around Christmas, while having a plausible explanation for the downtime that blames it on a malicious third party.
Reading they do indeed have had (and still have) performance issues supports that speculation.
Amazon needs to move their cloud into space. Yes, space! It's the next big frontier beyond clouds, and you heard it here first.
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Apples and tomatoes.. Unless your company already owns a fully equipped data center with excess capacity you have to factor in colocation space, power, cooling, backups, network infrastructure, and security. And if you're not colocating in a space where you can purchase bandwidth you have to factor in the cost of the physical circuit(s) (T1/T3/Metro-E, whatever).
We haven't even begun to consider availability. What if your app can't tolerate 4 hours of downtime (for the HP monkey to come swap out your motherboard)? Now we need redundant servers, redundant connectivity, generator and ups capacity, highly-available network infrastructure, load balancers, etc. Let's not forget the highly paid staff/consultants to implement and maintain all of this.
What happens when your app takes off and you need to scale rapidly? Now you have to procure and install servers, keeping up with the infrastructure required every step of the way.
Also, don't forget in 5 years that $13,000 server you just bought will be a boat anchor. Time to purchase a whole new round of hardware.
I'm not claiming cloud computing is the end all solution for everything, there are certainly drawbacks.. But you cannot compare the cost of a $13,000 server to a $6,000/year instance lease as apples to apples.
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
Purchasing hardware implies a lof of other costs - where you will host it, how you will connect it, how you will back it up........ Going a traditional hosting route for this is ridiculously expensive. You need to rent the hardware, you need to communicate with the hosting company about setting up, you don't know how it will be set up (at least things are standardised with EC2), how you will handle failover (buy more hardware!) and how you will back it up (buy more hardware and storage!). Can you snapshot your data easily? Can you simply fire up a copy of your server to get running again or do testing? How will you recover from a hardware failure or a disaster where you don't hear from your hosting company for several hours while everyone bites their finger nails? It's why every other hosting company is either denying that EC2 is happening, trying to trash-talk it or trying to come up with their own 'cloud' virtualised, decentralised storage platform with some kind of software management tool........and generally failing at it. They will either respond to it or they will die.
Excuse me while I get up off the floor from laughing. What kind of 'support' do you think you get for that and how useful do you think it is? That supports is for ASPs and hosters. For the rest of us, deploying something means several layers of support on top of that for the hardware. Trust me - every other hosting company has scaling, infrastructure and bandwidth issues. I've been through it. My experience with EC2 in my somewhat limited comparative forays thus far have been infinitely preferable.
Yer, probably because you don't back anything up and you haven't had to handle recovery from a disaster. Pffffffffffffffff............... We can see who the average Slahsdot reader is when this gets modded up with this level of grammar.
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