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jreadon Benchmarking of EC2's new Cluster Compute Instance

Correct, these benchmarks are highlighting the performance of an individual cluster compute instance, not a cluster of instances.

jreadon Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

I'm running 4 m1.small EBS-backed LAMP servers in all 4 regions. I pay about $1/mo for EBS IO (8-11 million IO requests per instance per month). The servers get a few thousand hits per day. The cost of EBS IO should be minimal in most cases. The benefit of EBS versus the local storage you'll get with Rackspace or Linode is greater durability because it is off instance and AWS automatically duplicates the data. If the VM host system fails (i.e. power supply goes bad), you can bring your instance back online within a very short period of time on another host at the exact state it was at the time of failure.

jreadon Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

I've had 2 spot instances up for over 6 months. My bid price for those instances is the on-demand price.

jreadon Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

To my knowledge (I've spun up many EC2 m1.small instances in all 4 regions), Opteron 2218s are only in use in us-east. The other 3 regions use E5430s.

jreadon Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

A good strategy I've used with EC2 for the past 6 months is to always purchase spot instances using a bid price that is just slightly above the on-demand price. Generally spot pricing stays around the much lower reserve pricing but will occasionally spike. By doing this, you basically get reserve pricing without having to pay the upfront reserve fee, and can keep your spot instance online long term. This site provides some useful historical data on spot pricing: http://cloudexchange.org

jreadon Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

One of the biggest advantages to using EC2 is its scaling capabilities. EC2 offers 10 different instance sizes from m1.small to cc.4xlarge (with 10 Gbps clustering capabilities), 4 different regions, auto-scaling, load balancing, high availability via off-instance storage, durability via copying, GigE uplinks, and much more. You can't get that level of features from in any other IaaS cloud I am aware of. Yes, you might pay more than co-locating yourself or leasing some dedicated servers... but that isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison to EC2.

jreadon Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

c1.medium is also available only in 32-bit

jreadon Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

Here is a Geekbench benchmark report for one of these new micro instances: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=287891 . It uses the same E5430 processors as the other m1 instances. CPU performance is about 2x m1.small based on these m1.small Geekbench results: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=241412 and comparable to a rackspace 4GB server I also benchmarked: http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view?id=243138.

jreadon Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2

This study was sponsored by Rackspace... I think the end results are questionable. Here is a study I wrote comparing AWS, Rackspace and some other cloud providers using some more standard benchmarking methods: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...

jreadon Ask HN: Where do you host your webapp?

VPS.net sells both highwinds and Akamai. Akamai is $100 for 1 TB. However, they only offer origin pull, so performance will be slightly degraded versus using their NetStorage.

http://www.vps.net/forum/public-forums/technical-discussions...

jreadon Ask HN: A VC wants to talk to us, what to expect?

Thanks this is very helpful information. He introduced himself as an "Investor", but his linkedin profile shows his job title as an analyst. I'm guessing that is probably at or below the associate level.

jreadon New Amazon EC2 Instance Type - The Cluster Compute Instance

This new cluster compute instance size is essentially a variation of the m2.4xlarge instance (2xX5550 Nehelem - 27ECUs) with the following changes: 1. Faster X5570 CPUs 2. 10G Network 3. HVM

I think the most noteworthy feature is the 10G Nic which is more conducive to clustering than the standard GigE Nic for other instance sizes. I'm not aware of any other public IaaS provider offering 10G network currently.

In terms of raw performance the x5570 will probably perform very well relative to other IaaS providers. EC2 is one of the few IaaS clouds that utilizes a heterogenous hardware environment to enable better scalability between instance sizes. Other providers like Rackspace Cloud use homogenous environments (Opteron 2374 in the case of Rackspace) and rely on Hypervisor CPU throttling to enable CPU scaling between different instance sizes. On the low end homogenous clouds tend to offer better value but are not well suited for HPC application on the high end (e.g. a 2GB Rackspace Cloud server kills an EC2 m1.small, but the largest 16GB instance lags far behind EC2 m2.* instances). In fact in some homogenous clouds CPU performance is fairly constant from small to larger sized instances (you are essentially just paying for more memory).

I recently wrote a blog post comparing CPU performance of 20 different IaaS providers including EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. In it I used a compilation of 19 different CPU related benchmarks to produce an ECU metric for about 150 different cloud server configurations:

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...

jreadon Ask HN: Managed dedicated hosting recommendations

Also, The Planet has a cloud service in beta with some advanced support options like monitoring and pro-active downtime response

jreadon Ask HN: Managed dedicated hosting recommendations

Here are a few cloud providers I'm aware of that offer "fully managed" or advanced support options:

EC2 (with premium support - pricey)

Storm on Demand

SoftLayer

Storm on Demand is a new IaaS platform backed by Liquid Web. Pricing is reasonable, support is good, and they really know what they are doing. I've been using their service for about 3 months now with no issues or downtime.

jreadon Amazon EC2 freezes Moore's law

You're right, I meant 0.5-14GB, I hadn't noticed their new 16 and 20GB instances.

jreadon Amazon EC2 freezes Moore's law

It could, but it is extremely rare. Check out http://cloudexchange.org to see historical pricing. A spot instance cannot be changed to standard pricing.

jreadon Amazon EC2 freezes Moore's law

> No diff in utilization. You can still use the API elastically spin up new instances, if at a different scale. They both have APIs, but EC2 has hourly billing versus monthly for Linode (they issue service credits pro-rated daily if you don't use a VPS for the entire month, refunds are manual and require a processing fee). EC2 also offers more options in terms of CPU and memory (3+ different CPUs and 1.7-32GB versus 0.5-4GB and single L5520 CPU architecture). They are both elastic, but from a billing perspective, Linode's elasticity isn't too practical.

> I guess, if that sort of thing matters to you. I don't really like relying on third parties for utilities like that. It may matter for your project, if you need automatic-elasticity, more durable off-instance storage, better security, more compute power, more memory. Linode can't provide these features.

> K, but has anybody been making their machines faster? Sure, EC2 has upgraded their m1 hardware the past couple of years, GoGrid is upgrading to Westmere later this year, Storm on Demand has upgraded some of their hardware, Flexiscale has upgraded, and others.

jreadon Amazon EC2 freezes Moore's law

If you want to get the lowest pricing on EC2, use a spot instance request where your bid price >= standard pricing (i.e. 0.085/hr for m1.small). This will essentially get you a spot priced, but indefinitely persistent instance and you'll typically pay 1/2 or less than the standard pricing. I've had a spot instance running for 3 months paying about 45% off list price on average.

jreadon Amazon EC2 freezes Moore's law

Linode is VPS, EC2 is cloud computing. Although I agree that Linode is probably the best VPS provider around, EC2 provides a lot of cloud features that Linode does not including CloudWatch monitoring, autoscaling, external EBS storage, greater memory and compute power options, AMIs, virtual private cloud. So Linode vs EC2 is not exactly an apples to apples comparison. If all you need is VPS, then Linode is really the best option available.

jreadon Amazon EC2 freezes Moore's law

I don't necessary agree with this post. Many m1 hosts have been upgraded from the original Opteron 2218 hardware to Xeon E5430. In the US East region you may still end up getting an m1.small 2218 though. EC2 fixes CPU allocation, so you won't get very good performance on an m1.small... 1 ECU just isn't designed to provide much compute power (1-1.2 GHz) With spot pricing, you can get small instances for typically about $0.04/hr which is reasonable if you just need a simple web server (EC2 gives you 100 Mb/s+ uplink and generally very good bandwidth & low latency).

The newer m2 instances use x5550 Nehelem hardware and perform quite well. You'll generally get the most compute power for the money with an m2.xlarge instance (6.5 ECUs) which generally performs much better than the supposedly 20 ECU c1.xlarge Xeon E5410 instance. m2.xlarge can generally be had for around $0.17-0.30/hr (spot pricing) which is very reasonable for 17GB ram (compare to Rackspace Cloud $0.96/hr for 16GB cloud server running on less powerful Opteron 2374 hardware).

If you are interested in other providers, I've done a complete specs/performance/price analysis of 20 different cloud providers including EC2 here: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma...

jreadon Cloud Server Benchmarking Part 4: Memory IO

I had some issues with google charts trying to show all the results in one. All of the charts use the same scale, but does require some inconvenient scrolling.

jreadon Poll: Which CDN do you use?

I'm in the process of doing that... however, for now access requires a user and password which could change over time so I'd prefer not to post it here publicly. If you email I'll provide the access, no strings attached. I'm looking to get some feedback from the report as well.

jreadon Poll: Which CDN do you use?

MaxCDN is a really good value and the cheapest for an anycast cdn. vps.net resells akamai for $100/TB ($0.10/GB) which is also a great deal although you don't get netstorage with that (origin pull only). Simplecdn is not a great cdn, we've actually experienced outages on their service and performance generally sucks. cloudfront is good and getting better as they add more pops. If I were to pick a cdn I'd go with edgecast (gogrid or speedyrails resells), cachefly, internap (softlayer resells), cottendo.

jreadon Poll: Which CDN do you use?

If you'd like to see the full results of these CDN tests (about 4 months worth of testing so far), I have created a report that shows performance of each CDN globally and broken down into 32 different regions (i.e. US West, EU West, APAC, etc.). I'm happy to share the results, email me if you would like access: jason [at] cloudharmony.com

jreadon Poll: Which CDN do you use?

If anyone is interested, I've tested bandwidth performance of all of these CDNs using a CDN speedtest here: http://cloudharmony.com/speedtest

I pay users on mechanical turk to run the speedtest and get about 1000 tests run each month from around the world. The speedtest does a single large file test and another test consisting of lots of small files downloaded concurrently like a browser would download a webpage. The results show that the Anycast CDNs (MaxCDN, CacheFly and Cotendo) generally perform better for the multiple smaller files (i.e. CSS, JS, images) due to usually lower latency, while large files generally download faster on the larger (as in more PoPs) DNS-based CDNs like Edgecast and CloudFront. Overall, the top performers based on this testing are Edgecast and CacheFly. CloudFront does well in Apac, but is only about average in the US. GoGrid or Speedyrails resells Edgecast at very reasonable pay-per-use rates.

jreadon Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

http://uptime.cloudharmony.com

If you click on any of the Linode links, you can see when outages occurred, how long they were, and usually an explanation of the outage (if Linode provided one to me)

jreadon Ask HN: Colo hosting cheaper than high-end VPS, so why VPS?

Usually a good outsourced provider will have measures in place to monitor and pro-actively deal with hardware failures as well as maintain standbys and replacement parts onsite. My point is simply that by outsourcing you don't have to deal with those issues. You might still get the call, but your provider should already be working on a fix.

jreadon Ask HN: Colo hosting cheaper than high-end VPS, so why VPS?

I agree it is cheaper (I have a full cabinet of hardware co-located myself), but at the expense of being on call 24x7x365. Although hardware is generally reliable, it can and does fail. Do you want to be the guy dealing with the burned out power supply at 3AM?

jreadon Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

Not only that, but Linode doesn't cap bandwidth based on node size. I've been able to get up to almost 200 Mb/s out of a Linode 360 whereas the smallest slice (256) is capped at 10 Mb/s

jreadon Linode Turns 7, Big RAM Increase

Linode has 5 data centers. I've maintained a node in each of them the past six months with the following results:

Dallas: 99.959% Newark: 99.971% London: 99.986% Fremont: 99.992% Atlanta: 100%

I've heard from others here that Atlanta has been a very reliable LN data center for them as well.