back to article Amazon to all data centers: Keep up, if you can

It's no secret that the utility computing offshoot of online retailer Amazon thinks that it can build a better data center for running Web applications than you can. But the news today, along with the launch of an online store for buying apps and deploying them on the Amazon Web Services cloud, is that the company thinks you …

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  1. banjomike

    Best curve??

    Looks more like you just joined up the points.

  2. Nate Amsden

    wake me up

    wake me up when amazon

    doesn't require you to build your application to fail (that is, not react badly when infrastructure goes bad and doesn't recover),

    and when they allow you to pool cpu/memory/io resources,

    and when they have a support team that gives a shit about the customer,

    and the ability to move VMs off of degraded hosts w/o requiring user interaction,

    and when they allow you to reserve a static ip both internally and externally for a VM.

    And when their RDS service allows users to skip mysql replication errors (no SUPER rights)

    And when their EC2 intsances allow more than one external and/or internal IP to be assigned to it (load balancing purposes - e.g. run the Zeus EC2 package)

    And when ELB doesn't blow hard donkey balls

    And when EBS latency SLA drops to normal levels (not 200ms as it is now)

    and when they integrate things like replication between their regions (as-is, did you know if you have S3 data in region "A" and want to get it to region "B" you have to do it yourself? You can't even establish replication using their own RDS DB system between regions - and you can't replicate from RDS to a non RDS instance either).

    did you know that amazon requires you define an "outage window" for all of your EC2 and RDS resources (maybe others too haven't checked?). They reserve the right to take outages on their stuff during those windows and you can't opt out.

    I could go on and on and on

    it's a joke, really.

    (Amazon user off and on for almost 2 years, it's been the worst experience in my professional career and they top it off with staff and support that doesn't care "it's not our fault you didn't build your application right"). But at least I wi ll be rid of amazon soon, last bit of stuff being moved out next month.

    1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
      Thumb Down

      Re: wake me up

      > doesn't require you to build your application to fail (that is, not react badly when infrastructure goes bad and doesn't recover),

      Shouldn't you *always* build your apps like that anyway, just as basic good practice?

  3. Jeff 11

    There's one thing that Amazon and its cloud rivals can never do, and that's provide the service levels and capabilities of your own physical infrastructure.

    High-throughput storage... fast interconnects... the ability to run your OS of choice... shared block storage... synchronised offsite replication... I'm sure Amazon will sell you the world's smallest violin if AWS doesn't meet your system's requirements. A datacentre will at least provide you with a rack to build it yourself, and will probably help you out in implementing it as well.

    When the world runs entirely on Amazon's homogenized virtualized instances of systems, and is perfectly scalable, Amazon may well achieve its dream. But I'd venture that the majority of those hundreds of thousands of 'web applications' that this guy is talking about would run just as well on traditional hosting services. And it's those hosting services that are really under threat from AWS, not the datacentres they run from.

  4. El Limerino
    FAIL

    Methinks thou doth protest too much, Werner

    Every Werner pitch I've seen in the past year has been about how Amazon can run real Enterprise workloads, really, please believe us, goddamn we can't maintain our growth rate with start-ups, don't you see?

    Then they show a bunch of big company logos while failing to mention that they're running a small dev/test effort, some monte carlo simulations (with no customer data), maybe a web front end or two... because the crushing truth is that without a re-write, your app is not going to do well at AWS. Just ask SAP, who gave up on trying to get their core app to ever run well with good performance (thanks EBS!)

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