Amazon EC2 May Be Experiencing Growing Pains 93
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."
Staged DDoS? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
still too expensive (Score:2, Interesting)
i priced out a high memory config and it's like $6000 per year or more for 32GB RAM of memory and 8 CPU cores. In a few months Intel will ship server CPU's with 12 logical cores per socket. RAM prices are dirt cheap and at current prices a 36GB RAM HP Proliant DL 380 G6 will run around $13,000 and 72GB of RAM another $2000. and that includes 5 year 4 hour response time support, some of the other extras like advanced ilo, and i forgot what else i added since it's so cheap.
add in the increased bandwidth costs and the supposed cost savings vanish. it's like the ghetto people that lease a lexus or a Benz because they can't afford to buy or they like the lower monthly payments. it's like 2000 all over again. hardware is expensive to ASP's set up shop. hardware prices drop for the power you get and ASP's go out of business.
and i think this is a scam by the hardware companies. i buy an HP server i buy one machine and a few hard drives. to support me Amazon needs to buy a few servers and 5 times the raw space for DR purposes.
Re:Cloud computing reliability! (Score:3, Interesting)
from what i read a lot of people like to use it for testing. you can "create" a server with a loaded OS in seconds, test and and "destroy" it by lunch. I can do this on the free version of VMWare ESX but i don't know if i can copy a bare instance i set up to another instance. Otherwise we have a sort of old Proliant G5 server with the free version of ESX that we use for testing different things. in the past we used the crappiest server we had. if we needed multiple machines we were screwed. with Vmware and Hyper-V you can even create virtual Windows MCSC clusters easily.
it's aimed at smaller shops with less cash on hand. for larger organizations it doesn't make sense
Re:still too expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
the per hour plans are cheap. but the 24x7 hosting EC2 plans are a lot more expensive than physical hardware. and we're in a cycle where the hardware power is increasing at a very fast pace again. few years ago 4GB RAM was expensive on a server. today when we buy RAM for a newish server we just buy 32GB of RAM. the price difference is so small it doesn't make sense to buy less. $1200 or so for HP branded 32GB RAM. a few hundred $$$ less for 16GB or 8GB.
CPU's power is increasing and next year with Sandy Bridge the I/O rate which has almost always been the big bottleneck will make another huge leap and EC2 won't be able to match the performance increase since they spent obscene millions of $$$ on what is soon going to be obsolete hardware that you can barely sell on ebay.
Re:Amazon can't eat its own dog food (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, I think Amazon and Google intend to be the end of the chain. They don't want to buy computing services from a third party.
They may want to, and it might be reasonable. One reason for them wanting to do this is that they are so far the top dogs in the fight and their buying from smaller players would not make economic sense. They cannot buy from each other because they have very different models - Google's "cloud" services are much more restricted than Amazon's.
But if/when more players come into this field, it might make sense for them to buy computing resources from each other. Both buyer and seller would gain. Seller gets to earn for his idle resources - these earnings would be non-zero but less than if they were selling to an end customer. Buyer, of course, avoids disappointing his customers and save his face.
Though there might always be some cloud service providers who will not buy/sell. This does not mean there is no value in cloud guys trading with each other.
Re:Missed Opportunity (Score:3, Interesting)