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Rackspace vs. Amazon — the Cloud Wars
fdicostanzo writes "The folks at Mixpanel are leaving Rackspace's server cloud for Amazon and have left a little note about their reasons. There's been some talk that Rackspace's offering has not been up to snuff once you scale. Analysis suggests that Rackspace's offering still has some advantages however."
Virtual machines are not true cloud computing. Please stop calling it that.
They missed the fact that RackSpace offers hybrid cloud options that Amazon just can't match at this point. Got IO issues? So did GitHub when they were running on Amazon's infrastructure. Know how they solved it? They moved to Rackspace and married the cloud for front-end with physical hardware for their IO intense workloads. It seems to me these guys may just be naive. They've probably only sidestepped their problems for now.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
Interesting discussion. Perhaps more companies could make business out of their spare resources as Amazon does.
Also funny, in the comments section with GoGrid.com trolling with a $100 coupon code. Way to sweeten the pot...
What's missing here is mention of Rackspace's recent effort with NASA on OpenStack. In short, Rackspace recently Open Sourced their Cloud Storage infrastructure, called Swift.
The problem with these solutions is they sell you services like a prepaid phone company to abstract the real cost.
My company has done the math and unless you only need the capacity say, 3 hours out of the day, EC2 (and Rackspace) simply can't compete with running your own hardware. We've heard the arguments about hiring engineers, buying servers, and renting space, but even after those expenses you still come out ahead if you have roughly more than 20 machines.
Also, Rackspace and Amazon sell Xen virtualization hosting. The software is open source and freely available if you want to use it for yourself. I just guess "Cloud Hosting" sounds better but it's not that hard to roll a similar setup if you want the scalability.
I locked myself out of a server the other day hosted on rackspace. I was able to console it from the management interface and fix the issue, not sure if I could have recovered that on ec2.
Got Code?
If you are going to post a "missive to the world" slamming someone's product, you ought to at least proofread it. It's just a bit embarrassing that the very first sentence doesn't make any sense. “...our hardware is” - yes, it's very existential hardware.
Serving as your local grammar nazi today...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Cloud Computing is such a loosely-defined and heavily abused term that its "true meaning" is almost as open to interpretation as "Web 2.0," and virtualised resources are often included in the definition.
The ever-colloquial Wikipedia states that it "typically involves over-the-Internet provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources" while Foldoc states that it is "A loosely defined term for any system providing access via the Internet to processing power, storage, software or other computing services."
I'm fine with people debating the issue of the term's definition and provenance, even with people saying that one meaning is correct and another isn't, but flatly denying the existence of controversy without bothering to cite your authority is not conducive to anyone's understanding. Please, explain your position rather than simply stating it.
Meta will eat itself
a good Rack !
Seriously, get some good writers BESIDES yourself and get actors who can actually ACT! And while you're at it, less CGI would be good and a couple more space battles....eh...what?
Oh, 'The Cloud Wars' isn't the title of the next Star Wars movie? Oh, sorry.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
It is a period of civil war. Rebel Linux admins, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Microsoft Empire. During the battle, GNU spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, ISS, a system that brings any self-respecting admin to tears. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Tove Torvalds races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the network.
I am officially gone from
The difference between a great idea and a billion dollars is that last 1% of the implementation - the distance between "cool" and "perfect".
I think Amazon may have bridged that gap.
Do you mean IIS? Or are you talking about that moon orbiting overhead?
That's no moon... It's a Space Station!
Every other day there's an article linked to from Hacker News about "Why I did XXX" or "Why I switched from XXX" Usually they're pretty lame. I saw this yesterday and thought it was the lame even by H.N. standards.
What we really need is William Shatner pitching "name your own price" for cloud resources. Yes, you CAN get cycles in a four-star data center located near the major metro area you've selected. I like the resources being commodities - more options, cheaper options. Yum!
You gotta be kidding me ... this story has been up for over an hour, and nobody has said ... "begun, the cloud war has".
I assumed that was the whole purpose of the title? :-P Or is everyone else disavowing knowledge of Episodes 2&3. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'll start a competing service where a gnome statue touts rack space where the deer and the antelope play
Amazon has that ..
With amazon you can buy a 'reserved' instance .. You pay some $$$ up front for a period of time and then a smaller price per hour. Works out to about 75% of the cost of leaving an instance running all the time. With very little benefit to turning it off.
If for some reason your model changes you can place your reserved instances up for bid and allow someone else to use that resource for some amount of $$ ..
Biggest issue is I have with Google cloud is it's not secure using your own domain name. You have to use google's SSL address and that doesn't fly for a lot of people.
You can't just keep scaling horizontally to avoid noisy neighbors. The problem is, unlike with cpu and memory, Amazon doesn't currently have a way to control how many IOPs one tenant has. You might even scale up from 2 "servers" to 4, and end up with the same neighbor because you're on the same underlying hardware. Plus, the issue is: it's not predictable. You might have great IOPs at one point, and then some other tenant starts consuming a bunch of them and there's contention, and your performance degrades.
The first sentence of the note reads:
...
"At Mixpanel, where our hardware is and the platform we use to help us scale has become increasingly important."
I had to read that thing a few times, and mentally insert commas, before it made any sense. There are a number of sentences that display a similar lack of punctuation and proper grammar.
I have always been of the opinion that if you are going to talk smack about someone, do it with style.
I feel much better now.
Amazon is not running a cloud with their spare resources. I believe I heard at one point that someone (Zynga?) was running 10,000 VMs on amazon at once. And that's one customer. Amazon is trying to be THE host of the future. Which is funny, since their other business is retail.
But make no mistake - 10 years from now, Amazon could easily be known as the Cloud Infrastructure provider, who also happens to do some retail. (Or less than 10.)
Like spotcloud?
At least for a small instance, a reserved instance running full time for 3 years is 50% (50.8%, to be exact) of the cost of 3 years of full usage of an on demand instance. .085*24*365 = 744.6
(.03*24*365)+(350/3) = 378.666
Is the annual cost comparison.
Rackspace is generally known for great service, so I didn't hesitate to sign up and start using their cloud service for a business idea. Unfortunately, Rackspace Cloud was essentially another company that Rackspace bought and did not fully integrate or bring up to their own standards.
The several months that I had them before I migrated, I experienced:
1) Horrible technical support and the inability to get any of the actual administrators on the phone to troubleshoot. Terrible escalation procedures. If my system goes down I shouldn't have to submit a ticket and wait, I should be able to get on the phone and immediately have someone working on the issue.
2) Dropped emails. Not just queued, but dropped. Apparently if you are sending out a lot of emails, even if they are not spam (e.g. facebook automatically sends email notifications which you can elect; we had something similar), they will drop emails. Literally thousands upon thousands of emails were just deleted. No warning or notification or anything. No grace period, no buffer, nothing. This is horrible service.
3) Terrible uptime. I have had better uptime with free web hosts which I would never conceive of putting a business on...but to have to pay thousands per month for a service which is unavailable? No thanks.
4) Constantly being attacked and flooded because their security controls are not tight. We had issues sending emails, even at a low level, because someone was overloading their SMTP service because they had a virus and were sending spam. Great...so I can't send legitimate email because you can't block the account of the guy who is spamming. Nice.
5) Extremely inflexible. If you are using the Rackspace Cloud Sites, vs. installing and managing everything yourself, the interface is extremely inflexible. Simple things like ssh are unavailable. There is no normal cron. Everything is a hack if you want to get it to work, unless you simply want to use it to serve basic html and images. No decent interface for adding mail aliases. Worst offering ever. If you are going to offer an enterprise class solution, make sure you have the basics covered that even free web hosts offer first.
And what? Did they take any constructive criticisms? No. Did they give clear timelines for updates? No. Did they apologize for a lack of service? No. Credit? Not until we threatened legal action.
These guys suck. Go to Amazon.
I use Rackspace Cloud because it's simple. There's nothing to mount, nor is there a huge learning curve with setting up a VM. It's a great way to experiment with servers on a shoestring budget.
However, things change when you're moving from a handful of manually-configured VMs to an army designed to handle lots of load. Amazon's learning curve is certainly worth considering once you need to tune towards an app's specific scalability needs.
No, I will not work for your startup
Rack Space cloud sites is true cloud hosting, You do not add servers, you just pay for CPU usage like you are buying bandwidth. It is expensive and you can not customize it, but it always works and scales to meet demand.
It is not a VM, where you can install your own OS, Web server, etc. It is a apache server, mysql clustered backend and varnish cache front end.
Great for Blog hosting, PHP applications, etc. We do about 8-10 million page views on it per month and like it for what it is,
If I had staff that needed to configure servers all day, it would be different, but for hosting large dynamic LAMP websites, it is great and reliable.
Andrew
I'm a happy Rackspace Cloud customer. I use it for a few small VMs that I treat like normal, uniquely-configured servers, but I don't have to mess with all the details of running a data center, and that makes my life easier. I looked at EC2, and it became very obvious that it was not intended to be used that way. If you want to do the whole dynamic cloud thing where your log scraper uses an API to request more CPU for this VM, more RAM for that VM, and duplicate a few more web front-end hosts, EC2 definitely covers the bases, but I just wanted a couple servers with redundant power and storage, pre-built backup/restore system, in a data center that's professionally managed by people who are not me, and I wanted to do it without spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars up front.
In terms of business growth, EC2-style cloud computing is great for large organizations with their own developers who can afford semi-custom solutions that offload 80% of their server infrastructure to Amazon's data centers, but that's a market that will saturate quickly. The larger opportunity is customers like me, who are trying to help a small organization grow into a large organization without investing huge amounts of time and money up front (because they don't have either to spare yet), and need servers that aren't just run from someone's desk. If Amazon invests the short term returns from EC2 into something that competes directly with Rackspace Cloud, I'm sure they'll be competitive, but right now the two offerings aren't directly comparable.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Lmao Rackspace has nothing over Amazon. No one wants their shitty over priced crap network.
Anyone know what the cons of amazon cloud is at this point???
I don't want to step on any toes, but mixpanel does not seem to have the kind of traffic or growth that would call for dramatic measures (or articles). It looks like their application must be very I/O-intensive and most, if not all commercial clouds would be bad/limiting for them (does any provider give you numbers comparable to your own 10gbe or IB infrastructure without virtualization?). Sure, they can provide some room for growth on demand, but if it doesn't fit your application because you need I/O both throughput and low latency, you might still want to look at buying your own hardware.
You'll have different problems going that way, from rack temperatures to flakey RAMs, but it's much more flexible and a lot cheaper (in our case, the cost is somewhere around 15-20% of what we'd pay for EC2 including traffic over the past 5 years, as of last year or so when I bothered doing a comparison). Plus you don't need to write dramatic articles when you find out along the way that you aren't getting what you need. And you get to play with interesting hardware, but I realize that not everyone likes that. ;-)
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
you're just lazy.
Hey guys, just putting it out there that i'm starting up a cloud hosting service, like rackspace sites but easier and better. edgefire.net it's still really small and far from operational, just check in occasionally if you're interested
You know this is another complaint people had with the old mainframe software. All "power" is in the hands of the cloud provider, and you get what they choose to give, and not a bit more. The power of lots of corporations tends to get concentrated into a single huge entity like this. The mainframe "providers" maintained such an extreme lock-in that most banks are still locked in to the system, TODAY.
Why in the name of all that is good and holy do we want to return to that ? This is why GNU brought us out of "cloud computing" (then called (networked) mainframe computing) 20 years ago (and why microsoft brought the rest of the world out of it 5 years later).
Well, those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it.
Cloud computing must fail. Not because of lack of technical merit, but because we'll see "incidents" with google and amazon cloud computing, just like there were unisys incidents 20 years ago. And the sad fact is that Stallman, in his usual way-over-the-top manner, has a point : the cloud takes away freedom.
Cloud remains very expensive for stable user loads, because there remains no means to compare compute capacity between offers. Amazon suffers no price competition. The price of Amazon's original small instance remains unchanged after four years. 30 providers might use 23 different compute metrics. See http://cloudpricecalculator.com/ as a first pass ranking of providers by mapping all providers to ECU's
Even though Amazon perpetuated the 'myth' of offering their EC2 from their spare resources, they were developing whole new datacenters/infrastructures for EC2. I don't think their cash cow of 'retail' is anywhere close to moving to the same generic cloud that 'everybodyelse' uses.