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Amazon Makes It Almost Impossible To Calculate Their "Virtual CPU" Equivalent (informationweek.com)
dkatana writes: AWS started out defining its virtual CPUs as being composed of EC2 compute units, or ECUs, which it defined as an equivalent to a physical Xeon processor. However, a virtual CPU now looks suspiciously variable... A virtual CPU is whatever Amazon wants to offer in an instance series. The user has no firm measure to go by. From the article:
[B]y doing a little math, you could actually compare what you were getting in virtual CPUs in EC2 versus Azure. Also by doing a little math, you knew how to compare one Amazon instance to another based on the ECU count in each virtual CPU. Microsoft didn't look too bad in the comparison.
That is one of the casualties of the nomenclature change.
I have searched for updated information on how a virtual CPU is measured and found nothing comparable to the definition of the 2012 ECU measure. I have questioned Amazon representatives three times between Oct. 27 and Dec. 21, and don't have much of an answer."
In fact Amazon doesn't know themselves... I have asked them to compare to the i7 series and they simply don't have a clue.
That is not really possible. Amazon is getting to a monopoly position if you want to use all the modern Cloud stuff. Sure, you can get boxes from many different providers, but AWS has a ton of other services that you cannot buy from others and even more importantly, all the 3rd party Cloud services are running on AWS so they are faster if you are on AWS too.
I would not be surprised if in 10 years Amazon would be a verb for running server software like google is now for search.
Most people don't care about the exact performance, so it's not with spending the money and effort to precisely define or guarantee it.
Amazon is generic and cheap. Microsoft has really good integration with visual studio and .NET. Those are the factors people choose by.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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I read this a they're worth whatever they say it's worth (at the moment) and you're going to whine and complain about it but, not do anything about it. Until they start loosing a large dollar value of customers over it, they're not going to fix it.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Google and Microsoft will always have their own clouds. Those are two real competitors.
Alternative: build your own private cloud out of the smallest servers you can find that still suit your need. I did so: a private cloud on HP Microserver (gen 8). The things consume almost no power when idle. Taken together, they provide quite the computing power ( 64 cores, Xeon E3 ) and quite the storage (32 TB). Cost me around € 450 in electric power per year. Am not dependent on Azure or Amazon. Use no bandwidth when doing cloudy things.
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that the "Cloud" is nebulous....
Imho there is only 1 valid measurement for cloud solutions, how much will certain performance cost you. And you can only really find out by testing it for _your_ specific goal. Some apps require more cpu, others more disk, others more ram... there's no single number to indicate your price/performance index.
I'm not sure I'd call it whining - it's a significant investment for many to set up cloud computing the way they need it so I think it's a fair demand that if your gas station insists on measuring it's product in frackles that it give you a fair conversion rate for litres to frackles. My needs would be something predictable like rendering 3d images, so the first thing I'd be doing is measuring render times for the same image there and here. That's easy and relatively cheap to do, and the numbers scale directly, but I can see this being a serious issue for other uses.
then buy dedicated instances.
I like micro instances/instances which do not occupy full physical processors at Amazon because of availability and price for low-impact/bandwidth applications. For all other use lambda or dedicated instances.
Virtual CPUs are anyway difficult to asses - to me it may be very relevant to have the 1st level cache of the core which i run on undisturbed by other applications (since changing the cache hits is a big deal for specific numerical problems), and for you 20% more share of the CPU may be important.
1% of computation time not spend in my task on a physical processor can do as much damage as 50% change in speed.
A small side remark: the price for the different VCPUs also varies.
Microsoft is a joke and since Satya insist on moving everything to India, treating people like shit, and firing everyone after a few years for "IP" reasons, it's a trainwreck of a company that only still survives because of its initial brand-name and market penetration.
Except there's still a lot of potential market to capture. Microsoft and Google can charge less and get those people before they get locked in to Amazon.
This is a scam by ISPs. They won't give you a high-bandwidth uploading network connection at your home or office. So you have to pay rent to run some slow computer at some remote facility.
It's not 1990 anymore... why can't you host a server at your own place.
where can't you get high speed connections? NYC and LA are up to 300mbps and higher for time warner. other markets as well.
Alternative: build your own private cloud
The whole point of doing computing in the cloud is to handle variable demand. I spend 98% of my time writing and debugging code, and only 2% running the final model. But when I run it, I want to do it at scale. On AWS I can rent a dozen K80 GPUs for a few hours a week. There is no way it would make sense to own them, even if I could afford to do that.
I was considering using AWS... but it seemed to complicated with their calculator to get any kind of estimate of what it would cost me I went with dedicated servers instead.
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And with all the crap they're pulling with the telemetry and whatnot in Windows 10, they seem hell-bent on losing that as well.
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where can't you get high speed connections? NYC and LA are up to 300mbps and higher for time warner. other markets as well.
The first commonly used modems were a *thousand* times faster than that. Connections here in the US are very slow, like the typical 1.5 Mbps T1 or DSL connections in the Seattle area for businesses, but the claim that it takes more than three seconds to transmit a single bit, is a lie.
Big deal. Try asking azure support about licensing and they will flat out say I don't know. Assuming you bugged them at least a half a dozen times about the same questions beforehand.
> "A virtual CPU is whatever Amazon wants to offer in an instance series." No. The vCPU (Virtual CPU) aspect of an AWS EC2 Instance is the county of virtual cores that are exposed to an OS. In desktop computers, a quad core Intel CPU will appear to have four courses when looked at from inside the OS (my go-to way to count them in Linux is to run top and press 1). A quad core hyperthreaded Intel CPU will appear to have 8 cores. The vCPU metric simply tells you what the OS will show you, and tells you how many processor threads can run concurrently. > "If you deal with server sizing and instance price comparison, then the measure -- previously expressed as an EC2 Compute Unit or ECU -- is kaput." ... "It's the closest thing you'll find to an acknowledgement that ECUs are still in use behind the scenes, but Amazon no longer wishes to define them due to the changing nature of its underlying hardware."
Yes, ECU (Elastic Compute Unit) metrics are still used behind the scenes, but Amazon does publish them. Even for new Instances. Check out these URL's:
http://a0.awsstatic.com/pricin...
http://a0.awsstatic.com/pricin...
Of course, this isn't very parsable by human eyes. So someone started an open source project to display this data, and its available at http://www.ec2instances.info/
So yeah, TFA is wrong.
It's odd how much Azure seems to struggle to keep up with AWS. MS has no shortage of cash, and at the very least they could offer "MS SQL instances in the cloud" as cheaply as they needed to go get people locked in, It's not like NoSQL and message queues are rocket science these days, and the AWS versions have fairly minimal feature sets.
In the old days MS was all about lock-in, and while you never wanted to touch v1.0 of anything from MS, by the time 2.0 came out they were usually ahead of the pack in terms of feature checklist (quality not so much). I guess they've lost that spirit.
Google spent so long just offering a limited set a quirky services in the cloud. It seems like they're smart enough to stomp the competition: it always baffled my why they didn't. (They certainly know how to operate at scale as good as anyone.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Seattle's zoning law is anti-utility. For acceptable Internet performance, leave Seattle.
Back when Usenet was popular, members of certain groups in alt. used to call that kind of post a "spelling flame" or later a "spelling lame". If you want to complain about mbps vs. Mbps, please also have something helpful to say about the rest of the post.
But they not only measure in frackles but they also break your fuel gauge so you dont know how much they actually put in your car.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
(They certainly know how to operate at scale as good as anyone.)
Operating at scale when you're bespoke from the chip up is easy.
Well, relatively easy.
Operating at scale when any twat out there can do whatever the fuck they like to your commodity infrastructure (which must be relatively commodity or you can't sell it) is a very different proposition.
I'm confident Google could step into that market if they chose, but it's a deviation from their standard operating model.
We have multiple tier 5 data centres. Amazon/Azure is still useful for dynamic scaling for some of our workloads.
Some of the more optimised and specialised services can also really exploit cloud pricing. When part of our business can service millions of consumers for a few hundred dollars a year with Amazon we just can't get close to that price point in house.
But fuck it, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly just started on TV so I'm going to kick back, drink some vodka and enjoy cinematic perfection.
Microsoft survives for one reason: They are so well entrenched in the enterprise. Other than small companies that LDAP can work with, AD will be found as the core authentication and management mechanism of most companies out there.
Because of this, if MS sees losses on other fronts, they can just ratchet up Windows Server license fees, and still come out ahead, as they have a captive audience.
What? Have you even seen MS's offerings? They can't build DCs fast enough because so many people are signing up. Their stuff is at least in par with Amazon if not better.
This. All of this. More and more clients who traditionally went AWS (advertising campaign back ends, social media startups and so on) are picking Azure. The AWS tools are just crude in comparison and the Azure offerings are typically more complete, more robust and much better documented.
3-4 years ago suggest Azure hosting was suicide for a potential contract, these days it is an advantage and makes the guys pushing AWS look like they aren't keeping up. The perception is shifting fast.
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The old VAXen that DEC sold came with a measure called VAX Units of Performance (VUP's). You bought stuff with a certain amount of VUP's rather than raw performance specs. Now Amazon is selling some Amazon-specific measure of performance that benefits them more than us. More signs the cloud is just re-inventing the mainframes and minicomputers of old. Cheaper, faster, more flexible, and so on for sure. Same concepts, though, plus what it seems is the same bullshit. :)
Maybe its all meant to be like mobile phone plans. So complicated that no one can workout which better or cheaper