Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin with.
If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late.
I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest that to build a scalable service you yourself would prefer to use servers with necessarily poor price/performance?
Or are you saying that it's not possible to use dedicated machines to build a scalable service? Or that one should only use VMs, with their inefficiency and resource contention? How do you reason about disk seek performance? What happens when the spike hits, and another AWS customer on the box starts stealing CPU?
Actually, traffic spikes were the reason we moved off AWS. A single dedicated machine at Hetzner gives 10x the headroom at a fraction of the cost. That buys you time and capacity when you need it.
> If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late.
precisely. this is the other elephant in the AWS room. the only way to survive a spike without service degradation while vm spin up on that platform is through lambdas/s3 served pages/api gateway - but even lambdas lag behind traffic.
but then you need to build your whole architecture for it
anyway I'm running on AWS right now, but for other advantages and services, not for its scalability/price performance.
Baking your images and set your scaling thresholds lower should be able to largely deal with that.
The thing is though, the scaling is nice but most folks just want the auto-recovery. You stick your app over 3 zones, you have autoscaling and you can run with a couple of Ops savy devs and largely forget about it.
You no longer need to pay for that dedicated sysadmin who knows how to manage a datacentre when have a small number of technical staff. The extra hosting bills are less than hiring that other person.
precisely. recoverable multi zone postgres without paying a sysadmin. we can manage basic maintenance on our own, but setting up something like that require a skilled consultant in short burst at each upgrade/maintenance check, and for a small operation like ours it's too expensive if we want to match what amazon gives.
we do have a custom AMI that just fetch and build the latest snapshot release when we need auto-scaling or auto-recovery, but our real problem is that we currently depend on sticky session, so users accumulated on the initial instances get sucky performances. (and yes we are currently working on fixing it, we cannot outright serialize sessions on dynamo because, reasons)
This sounds like it goes back to my comment in that you aren't AWS' target customer in that you are fine with a bare bones provider and setting up handling all of this yourself.
It's shown that many people want all of this outsourced for them and will pay a premium to do so. I always find it a bit silly that every time an AWS service is announced it is compared to some bare minimum other provider that is out there that is cheaper. Of course it is going to be cheaper, but that really is irrelevant.
No, the context here was "EC2 Dedicated Hosts" and pinned VMs vs dedicated servers, which is a fair comparison. Or were you actually speaking about things like S3 or WorkMail and traffic spikes related to those?
People pay a premium for the currently 50+ other integrated services in the AWS ecosystem they can leverage vs. spending time and money doing it themselves if they went with another provider, dedicated hosts are no different re: pricing.
Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin with.
If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too late.
I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest that to build a scalable service you yourself would prefer to use servers with necessarily poor price/performance?
Or are you saying that it's not possible to use dedicated machines to build a scalable service? Or that one should only use VMs, with their inefficiency and resource contention? How do you reason about disk seek performance? What happens when the spike hits, and another AWS customer on the box starts stealing CPU?
Actually, traffic spikes were the reason we moved off AWS. A single dedicated machine at Hetzner gives 10x the headroom at a fraction of the cost. That buys you time and capacity when you need it.