New Amazon EC2 competitor - SoftLayer launches CloudLayer | Hacker News Reader

New Amazon EC2 competitor - SoftLayer launches CloudLayer

softlayer.com

37 pointssadiq23 comments

SoftLayer's real advantage seems to be in bandwidth. Offering bandwidth at $0.10/GB or cheaper in bundles, their CloudLayer Storage can offer some nice savings over S3 depending on what you need.

Likewise, while they haven't published their CloudLayer Computing prices yet, the plans do include 2,000GB of outbound bandwidth and free incoming bandwidth which is potentially a huge cost savings over EC2 since 2,000GB of bandwidth would cost $360 on EC2.

SoftLayer tends to have a wonderful reputation with many YC companies choosing it for their hosting. I'm not sure I'd want to be one of the first customers on this new service, but I'm definitely glad it's happening. If nothing else, hopefully it will put pressure on Rackspace and Amazon.

Another real advantage is that you can mix generic Xen instances with custom dedicated hardware (for specialized problems) -- all on the same, fast private net.

I've pushed a lot of backend bits between different server lots there, and my private vlan was solid, minus acceptable hiccups.

Looks like they are going to launch, the EC2 side of things won't be available till May 11th. I hope their cloud private network is not the same as the server private network. They have major issues with the private network and if you're site is connecting to a private network address for db, you are screwed.

Curious to know what issues you've had with SL's private network? We have more than twenty servers spread across Dallas that rely heavily on their private network. HTTP, MySQL, memcached, etc. Peaks into the hundreds of Mbps. While there have been hiccups, it's generally been fine.

+1 for the SL private network. Minus (minimal) outages, it's been excellent for us over the past 2 years.

It seems like it would be more useful if it were on the same private network, since you can mix and match dedicated and "elastic" servers on the same private network.

There's still some crucial information missing from this press release (prices and API) but from the information that is there CloudLayer looks like more of competitor to Slicehost and GoGrid than EC2. There's a big difference between launching a server in <60 seconds (EC2) and 5 minutes (CloudLayer).

SoftLayer has a good history of building an API for just about everything they offer. There is currently an API for the CDN [1], I'm sure they'll do the same for the other CloudLayer services.

1. http://sldn.softlayer.com/wiki/index.php/Cdn

> There's a big difference between launching a server in <60 seconds (EC2)

Do you achieve that in practice with EC2? I find 3 - 4 minutes is typical and as bad as 10 minutes is not uncommon.

10 minutes, wow. I've only experienced that with Windows instances (especially in eu-west) which I rarely use. Solaris instances are slower too but those are still considered beta.

I've been working on a development tool for EC2 for the past few months so I'm starting and shutting down instances almost every day. All of the Linux instances I've started have come up in less than a minute and usually around 30 seconds.

Keep in mind, if you're using a custom image or one that's been modified it could take longer depending on how large the image is (lots of preinstalled software) and what scripts are running on startup.

You hit the nail on the head - most of my instances are windows because I'm using them to run a small piece of windows software on demand. Didn't know there was a difference. Here's hoping they get a bit quicker as time goes by (maybe there's just not a large enough pool of them yet).

This is awesome. I was getting ready to migrate us to EC2 for the reserved instance savings, but we're already with SL so it might be cheaper to stay if they're offering monthly plans (which is basically like reserved). Can't wait for pricing info!

Looking at their S3 competitor, I can't seem to find any documentation on how you actually place data onto their storage system. They mention WebDAV, FTP, and "API", and Blackberry/iPhone applications. I couldn't find any more details than that.

http://http.cdnlayer.com/softlayerweb/PS_CLStorage_GettingSt...

I don't see any API; looks like a Web interface only.

That seems odd. Surely there's an API?

Looks like you can mount it as webdav on Linux and mount it either via FUSE or via some FTP-like app:

http://knowledgelayer.softlayer.com/questions/484/CloudLayer...

the actual link is http://cloudlayer.com (it's going to be their homepage on May 11th)

I'm pretty sure I just read my quota of (tm)s for the month.

In other news, it sure would be nice to see a list of places they have a CDN presence. Their CDN seems pretty limited as is, though. 24 hour sliding expirations for the origin service? Yuck.

They partner with Internap for their CDN:

http://internap.com/flash/maps/overview_map.html

More details on the service:

http://internap.com/cdn-services/deliver/http-content-delive...

You know what someone needs to build; a cloud agnostic layer. A standard API that translates across all these cloud companies.

It would reduce migration barriers and help drive down the price.

Several such efforts are underway; OCCI looks the most promising.

http://www.occi-wg.org/

Awesome! Thanks for the link.

Eucalyptus is an open source implementation of the EC2 API that runs on Xen. It could become a de facto standard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com