I wonder if this is true. If they work with 22 virtualized instances, maybe 10 good servers can provide more or less the same performances. Let's forget for a moment if EC2 is the way to go or not, and all the benefits, but I can't see how a company with a few millions can't afford running 10 big linux boxes instead to use EC2.
The article also mentioned $20,000 per month in hosting fees. The average T1 costs around $250/month, less if you're savvy. You need a physical location, because colo rates are still ridiculous IMO, so ... say another $2,000 / month, which is plenty for a small office in a warehouse district somewhere.
Even after lots of other goodies, you'd still have, let's say, $10,000 a month to spend on ... what? More machines? A bigger generator? Huge parties?
I don't think that "the cloud" is appropriate for certain applications -- and theirs would be one of them -- where you have large amounts of persistent data and large, sustained, ongoing bandwidth requirements.
Realize that, for what Amazon charges currently, you can buy an equivalent 1TB disk drive every single month. (Their monthly charges for storage alone, not including bandwidth, work out to a little more than the cost-per-GB for a good quality terabyte disk at current prices.)
Realize that, for what Amazon charges currently, you can buy an equivalent 1TB disk drive every single month.
You forget that disks fail. You forget that you always have to buy them in pairs for availability. You forget that someone has to be there (physically) to swap them. You forget that storage arrays that can truly scale seamlessly (akin to the experience EBS gives you) cost a fortune, not to mention the accompanying fibre channel infrastructure. You forget that maintaining a large scale Xen deployment is non-trivial (hint: there are companies making a living only of that!).
In short, you forget many things that bite large chunks out of your imaginary generator/party budget.
I added a T1 ($250/month) to a building rental ($2000/month), and then said that they'd have $10,000/month left over.
Why would I do such a thing? Why, so that:
They could upgrade to redundant DS3s (or better!)
They could buy extra drives!
They could pay someone to live within a few miles and carry a cell phone that accepts text messages!
...etc.
Doubly funny, to me, is that "disk failure" is being mentioned in the comments on an article about how all of their disks failed all at once. So, no, I certainly did not forget about disk failure. Indeed it's one of the reasons that I'd rather not host certain things as EC2 instances.
As far as scalability: Well, how far would 67TB carry you? Because you could deploy 67TB every single month and still have money left over. [1]
To get to the meat of my argument: I think that what's both great and horrible about EC2-like services is that they allow programmers to deploy Really Big Things without having to employ or deal with system administrators.
As a result, it's a solution that's being misapplied in some cases.
[1]: http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-h... -- it even has pretty pictures
So, no, I certainly did not forget about disk failure. Indeed it's one of the reasons that I'd rather not host certain things as EC2 instances.
I was mentioning disk failure as part of ongoing maintenance, which is a different thing to a once-in-a-year blackout that you (as the reseller of the service) don't have to debug and recover or actively protect against.
As far as scalability: Well, how far would 67TB carry you?
See, that's where the amusement starts. A service like heroku it would probably carry not very far. Their service is not about storage. The backblaze gives you 45 spindles for cheap. 45 spindles translate to roughly 4500 IOPS. That's a significant rate. It's also a rate that a few database intensive customers can exceed with ease.
Now you're suddenly in an entirely different game called "Storage Engineering". It's about things like balancing IO hotspots, redundant data paths and many other pesky little details that were not exactly your core business in first place.
You sure can scale out with backblaze, but it's rather unlikely that you can do it for cheaper than what amazon has on offer (economies of scale, y'know) because scaling IOPS is quite a bit harder than scaling capacity.
Here's a quiz for you: Why do you think none of the cloud providers other than amazon has an offer anywhere near the flexibility/price of EBS?
A T1 is simply not adequate for a web company for two reasons: 1) it is a high-impact single point of failure (any issue here results in 100% outage); 2) it is limited to 1.5mpbs. I guarantee you Heroku is beyond 1.5Mbps at peak.
To make this a fair comparison, you need to look at burstable bandwidth. Unless you want to manage your own redundant BGP routers and multiple carrier lines, you'll want blended bandwidth provided by your datacenter or a specialized company (InterNAP, etc). This bandwidth will run you $50-100/Mbps/mo (let's say $75) and is billed at 95th percentile of usage. A year and a half ago when my company's EC2 network transfer costs were ~$8,000/mo (with a total EC2 bill of ~$30,000/mo), I worked out a bandwidth need of ~60Mbps (at 95th%) - this would represent a bandwidth cost of $4500/mo. Let's assume Heroku's EC2 cost breakdown is similar, and that their needs are 2/3 of what ours were then - we're left with $3,000/mo for bandwidth.
Yes, you're still paying a premium, but the cost savings of colo hosting are quickly offset by the additional manpower required to maintain physical servers. Whatever difference still remains is easily justifiable given the amount of flexibility the cloud affords you. This is exponentially more important for a startup where agility can make or break you.
What's the relevance of this T1? How many of the 45k apps do you think you can serve concurrently in 1.544Mbps?
I don't have as much bandwidth as most people I know, but I can't imagine having any issues saturating a T1 on my own.
That being said, given how many toy, no-traffic apps are likely running (for free!) on the platform, I think we can safely assume there's a very high degree of multi-tenancy.
34.2 GB of memory
13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
Despite the size of 22 double-XL instances, they were a small portion of our overall footprint in EC2; it takes well over that kind of capacity to run the platform.
Those instance types all happened to be in one availability zone for a variety of reasons. Our platform overall does not live in a single zone.
Losing machines is not a problem for us (we cycle them constantly, in fact). Normally losing even that many machines would not even be noticed by our customers; this was an unusual case in which several factors cascaded into a larger problem.
To be clear, this downtime (45 minutes or so, with full normal state by 90 minutes) was, unfortunately, our fault - not Amazon's. EC2 instances vaporizing is an expected part of using the service.
We've made a couple of operational changes that will prevent these issues in the future, and we sincerely apologize to any customers who were affected.
I have no firm data, but a customer last year put a very low volume web app on Heroku, and I guess this is exactly what we saw: the first request after a quiesant period took many seconds - then subsequent requests were quick. If I am right about this, customers with high volume web apps would not notice this.