

Brightbox vs Amazon EC2: Phoronix Ubuntu 12.04 Benchmarks - jeremyjarvis
http://brightbox.com/blog/2012/09/20/brightbox-outperforms-amazon-ec2-ubuntu-12-04/

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jread
You have to careful comparing one specific EC2 instance with other providers.
Unlike most compute services, EC2 infrastructure is heterogenous. The
c1.xlarge instance compared might deploy to 2 or 3 different chipsets in us-
east-1, each with different performance characteristics. Based on the results
they posted, this instance appears to have deployed to a 2.13GHz E5506 host.
Most likely, Brightbox is using a homogenous infrastructure, and likely
something a bit faster, like X55, X56 or E5s. For a more apples to apples
comparison, they might have tested against an m2.4xlarge (8 cores) or
cc1.4xlarge (8 cores hyperthreaded to 16), which are also 8 cores and deploy
to X5550, X5570 or E5-2665. Based on my own benchmarking either of these
instances would have performed comparably or better than the Brightbox 8GB
instance.

The point is, you have a lot of options with EC2 in terms of performance, and
comparing a single instance deployment doesn't really do it justice.

[Edit] Here are a few links to Phoronix results for EC2 instance types not
included in their testing. m2s, cc1s and cc2s are the better CPU performers in
EC2 due to faster processors. If you do a CPU performance comparison, these
instance types should not be excluded (as I observe they often are):

m2.4xlarge - 8 cores - X5550 <http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1208019-SU-
CLOUDHARM39>

m2.4xlarge - 8 cores - E5-2665 <http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1208139-SU-
CLOUDHARM43>

cc1.4xlarge - 8 cores/16 HT - X5570
<http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1208127-SU-CLOUDHARM93>

c1.xlarge - 8 cores - E5506 <http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1208134-SU-
CLOUDHARM15>

These instances were tested using CentOS 6, which will be a bit slower than
Ubuntu 12.04.

~~~
comice
If the m2.4xlarge goes only on X5550 cores, then that does work out to be
about 26 compute units (as they claim). So I would expect a m2.4xlarge to
perform the same as a Brightbox large (which is about 26 compute units too).
The pricing (and ram spec) is very different though - not really a like for
like comparison, but I see that it's important to note their use of cpu type.
Interested in how xen vs. kvm is playing a part here too.

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ridruejo
People keep comparing EC2 and other hosting providers in terms of performance
and pricing. However, the biggest value in my mind is related to the agility
it provides (you can basically model and control your infrastructure through a
programming API) and the whole ecosystem around it (CloudFront, Route53,
Beanstalk, S3). Some vendors, including Brightbox, have some of that
functionality but it is a very small fraction of what is possible with AWS

~~~
jeremyjarvis
Yeah - that's fair comment, we don't have the same breadth of products as AWS
for sure. I agree absolutely that agility is what it's all about though.

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s_henry_paulson
From the comments:

In your price comparison you forgot to mention EC2 offers reserved instances.
Your instance would cost $466 USD a month, and an EC2 reserved c1.xlarge
instance would cost $102 a month with a 3 year reserved instance. If you
average out the cost to reserve an instance over 3 years, the total would be
$188 a month, This means EC2 is actually 60% cheaper than Brightbox.

~~~
jeremyjarvis
This is clearly a comparison of on-demand instances, where the common unit is
the hourly rate as with other IaaS. Reserved instances in themselves have a
cost in terms of commitment or risk (if you aren't able to sell them back
later).

~~~
RKearney
Then why not go by EC2's spot instances? Those would still be cheaper with
zero upfront commitment.

A c1.xlarge spot instance is $0.07/hr (right now) compared to the on-demand
pricing of $0.66/hr.

That means, assuming pricing stays consistent, a c1.xlarge instance would cost
$50 a month compared to $466 a month with Brightbox.

~~~
jeremyjarvis
Because it's not a common unit for comparison. The spot price can fluctuate.
Obviously.

(you edited your comment, so I'll edit mine :) ...

How can you assume the spot price will stay the same?

~~~
jjm
How can we assume Brightbox won't raise prices?

How can we assume Amazon won't raise base prices, possibly affecting the spot
market, then again this is a spot market! It's like asking how can you assume
stock prices (not exactly equiv, but thats not the point) will go up or down?

How can we assume anything?

We don't. I think the assumption on the wrong feature to market is the problem
here.

I only care that right now, EC2 spot are cheaper by a large margin. IF the
price raises to match then I'll adjust. I'm not locked in.

~~~
jeremyjarvis
@jjm both Brightbox and AWS have to give notice before increasing prices.
Again, I maintain the hourly on-demand price is a fair comparison

~~~
nphase
A fair comparison for what exactly? Many EC2 users optimize price for their
usage characteristics heavily with spot instances. Sure, a c1.xlarge costs me
$0.64 per hour, but I probably only need a few of those (at potentially a
reserved price point) as a baseline. Instead of scaling those up and down, we
choose to scale up and down with the c1.xlarge spot instances at a magical
$0.052 per hour price point and only switch to normal on-demand instances when
spot aren't available or the prices spike out of our target range (which,
historically, is rare).

Bottom line, comparing $0.64 vs $0.64 is fine for per-unit usage but doesn't
paint the full picture when it comes to actually building scalable systems on
EC2. Spot instances play a large role in that strategy.

------
RKearney
Posted on brightbox.com.

Surely this post won't be biased in the least.

~~~
kev009
The pgbench score is conspicuously missing too, which is heavily disk
dependent, which is universally heavily over-subscribed by VPS providers.

There's a smokescreen at the end "our storage is hardware RAID6 with 15k rpm
SAS disks" which means very little. (i.e. if that's internal storage across 8
spindles, it's barely going to sustain 1000 IOPS in anger. That could be
monopolized by a just a handful of VMs)

This link should be buried.

~~~
comice
I ran these benchmarks myself. The pgbench score just failed to run - I tried
a few times but it wouldn't even start. I put it down to a bug in the
benchmark. Should have explained.

But yeah, no diskio tests here really (other than the pgbench one, but I don't
know to what extent that would have tested diskio). The benchmark suite tests
were chosen by Phoronix. We'll do a diskio one at some point too.

~~~
mryan
pgbench will only stress your disks if the test database is too large to fit
entirely in memory (controlled by the scaling factor option).

bonnie++ results would also be interesting.

------
gizzlon
Looking at the pricing reminds me of how expensive cloud computing is if you
keep them all running 24/7..

    
    
        The small one would cost:
        server:         £0.025   * 24 * 30  = 18.00
        ip:             £0.0035  * 24 * 30  = 2.52
        20 GB /m out:   £0.12    * 20       = 2.4
         5 GB /m in :   £0.08    * 05       = 0.4
    
        = £23.32
    

Is this estimate correct? For this price you can get four and a half virtual
1-core servers, with 4 ip's, 4 TB of outgoing data and unlimited incoming
data.

Of course, cloud computing has additional features, so I'm not saying it's
never worth it. But it seems like a bad deal for most uses.

Am I missing something? or is this just the price you have to pay for the
cloud "extras" ?

~~~
giulianob
The advantage with Amazon is that if you get a reserved instance where you pay
a bit upfront, your hourly price drops dramatically. I think you can get
discounts upwards of 75% with reserved instances.

------
comice
We found comparing Xen to KVM on the same hardware showed similar results to
this too (things doing lots of ram allocations, like redis, do very well with
KVM).

------
ck2
If you are going to benchmark Apache, use 2.4 with event MPM which can be as
fast as nginx.

