64-bit small instances are perhaps the best new announcement. We now have two different builds and AMI's for all our different node types, just so that we can use a small instance when necessary and a large instance otherwise. We can now drop half of our images and use 64-bit everywhere.
The medium instances are also very welcome, since previously the gap between small and large was quite big (4x the memory for 4x the price).
It's also handy in case you want to switch instance types. When instances are stopped you can change their type if they are the same architecture. This means you can now switch an instance around to all instance types they offer.
Very much agreed. The 64 bit ubiquity move is a solid, sensible step which genuinely makes a lot of lives easier. Nice to see this happening, and it comes at an excellent time for hosting decision I was about to make. Amazon have probably just secured that with this move.
I remember being at a Cloud Unconference in Seattle about 2-3 years ago asking for 64bit for all instance types. Actually, I think I begged for it. It took a while, but I'm glad it's here now.
I would have to say, Amazon is at least receptive to suggestions. You can always email or chat with Jeff Barr and make suggestions.
Especially if you're running a platform that dropped 32-bit support in it's latest release (WinServer); can keep all of our instances consistent now without being behind an OS release.
We have most of our workload running on Rackspace Cloud Servers (UK) and the more improvements AWS make, the more overpriced and ridiculously underperforming the Rackspace offer becomes:
Underperforming: I don't get why the bigger Rackspace Cloud Servers don't get more CPU cores, just a bigger share of the original 4 cores on the host server. This might look fine but at the end I just want more processes (PHP threads) running at the same time.
Overpriced: The pricing is really high for Cloud Servers. I'm paying around £460 a month for a 16GB RAM Cloud Server (4 cores, 620GB (!) disk). For around €448 I have a Rackspace dedicated server with 48GB RAM, 2 x 6 (modern) cores and a 480GB RAID10 array.
I'm actually switching most of our workload to dedicated hardware, it's less cool but it's just cheaper and faster, in this case.
NB: We tried AWS but the MySQL IO performance, either in EC2+EBS or RDS, was not enough for us.
I've been told by my Rackspace rep that they're working towards moving away from VMWare and onto something else (based on their Open Stack system).
Supposedly (and take that with a grain of salt since this information is a few layers removed) the current VMWare based cloud they have is limiting how flexible they can be about their offering, i.e. every instance price level just doubles everything and all but the 32G instance has 4 virtual cores. Once they move to the new system supposedly you'll be able to mix & match things more. Maybe their current cloud really requires homogenous hardware, I don't know.
As for modern cores: Rackspace is somewhat conservative about what hardware they offer, though you can get special order. My desktop i7 2600K has single-thread performance that's essentially twice of the quad-core quad-CPU Xeon in the "real" server. A place like Hetzner -- http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr... -- offers a € 49 server using that.
As for AWS, isn't the way to "fix" that to use essentially striped EBS volumes?
The new Cloud Servers will have much greater flexibility and a better feature set. It will help solve many issues that customers have with the current offerings. That information will be coming out over the next couple of months, but since we are only about two-weeks different from the OpenStack nova code base, you can always look there for a preview.
Rackspace does offer a VMWare based private cloud (http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/private_cloud/) for customers who want virtualization, but on their own dedicated hardware. VMWare is not used for public cloud (as far as I know).
Obvious Disclosure: I work at Rackspace and this is to the best of my knowledge.
Hm, those dedicated prices are quite good, better than I'm paying at SoftLayer. Did you have to push very hard on the sales side to get that price? Have you been happy with reliability and support?
Not really, no. I had to push for the bandwidth prices, but not for the hardware. These are the detailed specs of one of those €448/month servers (Sep'11 prices) :
- DELL PowerEdge R710
- 2 x Six Core Intel Xeon E5645 2.4GHz, 12M cache
- 4 x 300GB SAS 15K RPM Drive (RAID10 controller with 256MB cache)
- 48GB DELL RAM
I would say their reliability is great on the dedicated side (their Cloud reliability is just OK) and their "fanatical" support is really good, as they advertise.
Edit: just to clarify these are Rackspace UK (LON3) prices.
I can't think of too many cases in which I'd have my private key but no terminal to SSH from, but I like having this option.
(Takes me back to bygone days of serving up MindTerm from my home computer over dyndns, a convenient way to do what I needed to do from restrictive school machines... Anyone else do that?)
I'm currently using the Rackspace VM that gives 4gb of ram. I wanted to switch to EC2 after they dropped prices, but I would have either had to drop down to a small (1.7gb - not an option for my workload) or up to a large (7gb - costs over $50/mo more).
With all of these improvements Amazon is making, Rackspace's VM offerings are now horribly overpriced.
This is a great news. Before that, if you start with a small instance, there is no way to upgrade to higher instance since they exclusively support 64-bit. Now you can upgrade smoothly from micro to any instance.
These are welcome changes, but I really, really wish that new medium instance had 2 or 4 cores. I would pay a bit more for that, and having a single core is where many of our workloads really start to feel the pain, but we don't need all of the power (or cost) or a large instance.
I understand the economics though - cores definitely cost a lot more than memory, so perhaps its just wishful thinking.
EDIT: I should clarify - I know they already have the "High CPU Medium", but it would be nice to have a step between that and the Large instance type that had two cores, but slightly more memory.
This is excellent, I was just complaining about the 32-bit-only medium high-cpu instance types yesterday. Now I just wish they'd add another mid-range instance with ~3.75 GB RAM and 2x2=4 or 2x2.5=5 CPU. Basically combine the higher resources from each of the medium types.
It's weird that they would introduce the Medium instance as "new", when it's actually a return -- they used to have Medium instances a couple years ago, and retired them.
The medium instances are also very welcome, since previously the gap between small and large was quite big (4x the memory for 4x the price).