

Migrating from EC2 to Rackspace - anthony_barker
http://www.conigliaro.org/2011/07/20/initial-thoughts-on-migrating-from-amazon-ec2-to-rackspace-cloud/

======
jread
I wrote about this topic on Quora a while back: [http://www.quora.com/How-
does-Amazon-EC2-compare-with-Racksp...](http://www.quora.com/How-does-Amazon-
EC2-compare-with-Rackspace-Cloud)

Most of the pros and cons listed there still apply. In it's current form,
Rackspace Cloud compute is little more than VPS with a few cloud features.
However, the next gen Rackspace cloud platform will make significant
improvements: <http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/nextgen/>

For now, EC2 is a far superior compute platform in just about every way.

~~~
moe
That's not quite right.

The smaller rackspace instances tend to perform better than the smaller EC2
instances (anything below m1.large), especially in terms of I/O.

If you don't need the advanced EC2 features then rackspace is also more
comfortable to use (real IP addresses, no messing with EBS).

~~~
bradly
Do you know if that is still true with the new 64 bit m1.small instances?

~~~
moe
I haven't benchmarked them specifically but I don't think there's a difference
in terms of I/O or CPU. At least I haven't noticed one (we've switched to a
64bit image a while back).

FWIW, we run a mid-sized deployment on EC2 (~60 instances) and anything
interactive has to go on at least m1.large and up (usually xlarge). We do use
m1.small's for queue-workers and low priority batch jobs.

------
pat2man
This article hits the big points quite well. We recently switched from
Rackspace to EC2 for exactly these reasons.

A few more points:

• Amazon has a much larger network and you can use multiple availability
zones.

• Amazon supports VPCs, allowing you to mix your cloud services with your old
school servers.

• Amazon's CloudFront CDN allows you to use your own servers as a back end,
not just static files.

• There are a wealth of third party tools available for Amazon that just
aren't there (yet) for Rackspace.

~~~
jarito
Rackspace also supports the ability to combine Cloud and Physical servers.
They call it Hybrid Hosting
(<http://www.rackspace.com/hosting_solutions/hybrid_hosting/>).

~~~
krobertson
Their hybrid offering still leaves a lot to be desired. They're more like two
separate products, and even being on a sales call with them involved people
from each team. It lacks a unified product experience.

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shuzchen
Having used a variety of cloud servers (Slicehost before the RS acquisition as
well as after) I would agree that the cloud offering from RS has a long way to
go, both in terms of features and performance. You get way better performance
from Linode (for less money last I checked) and tons more features from EC2
(as outlined in the article).

To me, the only good reasons to go with RS's cloud offerings are if you've
already got dedicated machines with them (and want simplified billing, or
integration via their hybrid hosting), or are planning to integrate heavily
with their other cloud services (e.g. free network to cloudfiles)

~~~
taligent
You also get significantly worse security and transparency from Linode versus
EC2.

    
    
      * No multi-factor authentication for admin screens.
      * No ability to pass environment variables from admin screens to instances (useful for keeping logins off instances).
      * Customer support has ability to gain root access to machines.
      * Little to no information provided about security incidents.
      * Generally poor transparency for all incidents e.g. outages, security.
      * Recent history of major security incidents.
      * Inability to get all information in a single RSS feed.

------
Fizzer
I recently compared the price of Rackspace, EC2, and Azure. If you compare the
prices per GB of RAM, EC2 is far, far better than both Rackspace and Azure,
which are about equal to each other. This only further solidifies the argument
for EC2.

Here's a graph of the three provider's prices: <http://i.imgur.com/G2laJ.png>

~~~
akh
Agreed, here's more evidence of the cost differences:
[http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/02/holy-cow-rackspace-
uk-c...](http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/02/holy-cow-rackspace-uk-cloud-
would-be.html)

You can use <http://www.ShopForCloud.com> to do other similar comparisons.

~~~
Kudos
As pointed out in other comments, you didn't actually bench them and it turns
out that Rackspace is better bang for buck in CPU terms. I wonder how much of
your data is flawed in the same way.

~~~
akh
I don't think it's as simple as saying "Rackspace is better bang for buck in
CPU terms". This is a complicated area and one which is being researched at
universities. See [1] for one such research project, which mentions that there
is even a "reasonable extent of variation amongst instances from the same
providers". It's also application specific and hard to predict (who knows what
other VMs will be running on the same physical box as your VM in the future).

Our blog post was a first step in this sort of comparison, where we wanted to
see if there was a significant-enough difference between providers to warrant
further studies.

Also, see asharp's comment above about Rackspace using a credit scheduler with
burst capacity.

[1] Lee Gillam, Bin Li, John O.Loughlin and Anuz Pranap Singh Tomar (2012)
"Fair Benchmarking for Cloud Computing Systems".
[http://www.cs.surrey.ac.uk/BIMA/People/L.Gillam/downloads/pu...](http://www.cs.surrey.ac.uk/BIMA/People/L.Gillam/downloads/publications/Fair%20Benchmarking%20for%20Cloud%20Computing%20Systems.pdf)

------
anthony_barker
The ones that I noticed in my eval of rackspace

1) internal traffic between boxes at rackspace is on the public network unless
you setup ipsec/ssl [http://serverfault.com/questions/184655/suggestions-for-
vpn-...](http://serverfault.com/questions/184655/suggestions-for-vpn-solution-
between-backend-servers)

2) Definite lack of firewalls and no deep packet inspection

3) No free micro tier for testing/dev

Others:

a) I don't like all the naming conventions of AWS - reminds me of Starbucks
where a small is "tall"

b) Neither seem to offer IDS out of the box and/or outgoing firewalls although
one can set-up snort/sourcefire (AWS offers this)
<https://aws.amazon.com/solution-providers/isv/sourcefire>

c) No two factor authentication services out of the box for application
authentication(need to use yubikey/duo security)

~~~
Cloven
1) no, rackspace boxes have two networks; an internal (inside the cloud) and
an external (public)

------
raverbashing
Actually the main issue is:

Sure, you can run an Amazon EC2 machine 24/7 (and get a 'competitive price')

But if that's your main usage pattern, go for Rackspace, Linode, etc

EC2 really shines on 'on demand' computing. Turning it up to 11 when you need
it and decomissioning it soon after. Sure, it's usual to keep 1 or 2 machines
working full time.

Whereas in Rackspace what you do is start a machine (you can pick from several
configs) and have it running permanently.

And AWS offer several services that are still sometimes missing from the
competition (like CloudFront, Route53, etc)

------
spamizbad
If you're running Windows cloud services, I tend to find Rackspace's cloud
easier to deal with. I use it extensively for compatibility testing, and have
found it preferable to EC2 in this regard. Setting up Windows VMs is easier
with Rackspace, as opposed to EC2 which has a terrible process and UI for
their windows stuff.

With that said, If I was building out legitimate infrastructure, as opposed to
just a developer test platform, the article correctly points out the
superiority of EC2 over Rackspace. EC2 has a powerful API that's unmatched in
the public cloud space.

------
SoftwareMaven
Our long-range goal is to host our own infrastructure. I chose Rackspace
because of OpenStack. I want the majority of my development effort to be
applicable when we decide to make that change.

------
piers
It seems that they (Rackspace) are just about to launch something that might
fix some of the issues that are being talked about:
[http://www.rackspace.com/blog/next-generation-rackspace-
clou...](http://www.rackspace.com/blog/next-generation-rackspace-cloud-
servers/)

~~~
anthony_barker
And the competition is heating up

[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/openstack-vs-
cloudstac...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/openstack-vs-cloudstack-
the-beginning-of-the-open-source-cloud-wars/10763)

------
ozataman
The message seems to be "don't".

