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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."
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.
Or you need to scale from 100 to 100,000 users in two days.
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I don't think that, with the fairly classical "cloud" guys like Amazon, who offer essentially Virtual Private Server products; but with automated provisioning, the argument has ever been about much more than flexibility. The more abstracted "cloud" people(gmail, google docs, etc.) can make the management complexity argument, since they offer highly abstract services with all the gory details hidden; but Amazon basically just tosses you a Linux VM and leaves you to deal with it from there. The only attraction is that, unlike classic VPS, you don't have to talk to a sales rep, just an API.
Given that with Amazon, all their EC2 stuff is either uber-commodity linux VMs or available for local hosting via the Eucalyptus project(their storage mechanism, etc.) it is possible to adopt a hybrid "base load/burst load" strategy, similar to how the electrical utilities do it. If your operation has a more or less steady base load, you run it on cheap boxes of your own. If you have a load spike, you use the expensive; but quick to spin up, EC2 instances. Since modern virtualization overhead is low, and virtualization is extremely convenient anyway, you don't lose to much, you don't pay Amazon a flexibility fee for things you don't need to be flexible; but you can swiftly pay for additional capacity that works just like your local capacity, and then stop paying when you no longer need it.
If you need long-term, stable levels of service, you'd be insane to buy it from a burst-service company, just as very heavy cell users would be nuts to buy a contractless per-minute plan. Either do it in house or hire a hosting company to do it for you, on a stable basis.
As far as I can tell, what you're looking for is just virtual hosting, with a few specific requirements. I would think you could find all of those requirements, although I'll concede that a lot of options available today kind of suck.
"Cloud Computing" in my understanding is in fact all about the automatic scaling. I want to do a proof of concept online, and then show it to a few potential clients. I want it to basically be turned off when I'm not using it, and scale up quickly if my clients start hammering it. I only want to pay for what gets used. If I'm not using it, sell that capacity to somebody else, and keep my costs down.
If your're a full-fledged business, and you want responsiveness, and you want to guarantee a certain level of service to your clients, then cloud hosting may not be the best bet, or even the cheapest. You could still use it for special cases though. I heard a neat example: this guy needed to convert several million images into thumbnails. He wrote a little service to do it, hosted it in the cloud, let it scale way up, and churned through all the images in a few days, and it cost him a few hundred bucks on his corporate credit card. The time and expense to set up dedicated servers for this one-off task would have been ridiculous.
Like every damn thing in computer science (and really, life) cloud computing is not the solution to all of our problems, and it's also not a complete waste of time. It's a useful tool, to be used when appropriate.
Ooo! Car analogy! If you commute every day by car, you should probably buy a car. If you take the train to work and just need the car for the occasional trip to Target, then a car-sharing service might work for you.
(1) You just assumed that your use case was all use cases. Here's an example of a company I've done work for that is in the cloud. They have software that maps 2d face photos onto 3d models and then can render video out in flash that is customized for the user. (If you tried Nike's world cup you-in-the-advertisement video ad, that was them.) Can you imagine how variable demand is if your cpu utilization goes up 10,000% when a client pushes an ad to market, versus when you're largely idle and doing demos and handling light consumer demand? That's burstability.
(2) On a lesser scale, many sites may have huge variation on when they have high traffic. I'm sure we can find a lot of sites that are insanely busy in the evening from, say, 5-9pm, and basically idle all night long.
(3) Many organizations - larger ones - need to supply temporary environments, like dev & test/QA build environments. They need to spin them up to test applications and then dump them. They might be utilized 20 hours/month, but be under heavy load for those 20 hours. Did your calculations take into account needing an entire copy of your production site for 20 hours a day for dev & test?
This is just a few of many examples. Outside of Amazon, cloud computing also is used internally. I know of one large bank that got rid of 30,000 desktop machines in favor of 10,000 racked servers and KMS services. By day, the KMS services serve desktops to users, and IT never has to go touch an end user computer again. By night - so 15-16 hours a day - all that cpu, instead of sitting idle and being wasted, is scooped up by the software running their financial modeling software, so it number crunches all night long. It's like a triple win - easy to administer "desktops", less actual machines, and a bunch of extra compute power for their number crunching farm.
So, you may have done the math for your use case, but there are companies which could easily afford to build out datacenter space, and instead are using huge amounts of cloud resources instead.
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.