
Rackspace cloud beats Amazon EC2, by a lot - davewiner
http://scripting.com/stories/2011/04/14/rackspaceBeatsEc2ByALot.html
======
jread
I've conducted extensive benchmarking of rackspace cloud, ec2 and about 38
other iaas providers. Rackspace cloud is definitely not faster than ec2 by a
long shot. Rackspace cloud utilizes homogonous infrastructure, AMD 2374 to be
exact. All instance sizes are burstable, so you typically get about the same
CPU resources on a 1GB instance as you do on a 16GB instance according to our
benchmark results. Ec2 on the other hand scales CPU much better all the way to
dedicated dual quad X5570s with the cc1.4xlarge. Both this and the rackspace
sponsored bitsource study compared an ec2 m1.small. Any study that does this
should be immediately discounted as that is about the worst possible
performing ec2 instance size. Adrian cockroft from Netflix refers to these
types of studies as benchmarketing. They do not accurately depict the
performance capabilities of ec2.

[http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-
benchma...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchmarking-
in-cloud.html)

------
AngryParsley
I think EC2 and Rackspace Cloud serve two different groups. EC2 is the only
provider on which I've actually been able to boot 50 nodes, have them come up
in a few minutes, use them for an hour, and kill them all off. That sort of
thing would be a giant pain on Rackspace Cloud, since they e-mail you the root
password when you boot an instance. Also, Rackspace Cloud accounts are limited
to 50GB of RAM usage unless you contact them to increase the cap. (Rackspace
only mentions this in their API docs:
[http://docs.rackspacecloud.com/servers/api/v1.0/cs-
devguide-...](http://docs.rackspacecloud.com/servers/api/v1.0/cs-
devguide-20110112.pdf) See section 3.8.2: Absolute Limits.)

Still, most small and medium-sized companies would do best to go with
Rackspace, Linode, or something similar. You'll get better support from them
and it's not often that a 10 person company needs a ton of servers for a short
period of time. Even then, you could use both: short-lived instances on EC2
and stable, well-supported, long-lived stuff on Rackspace.

~~~
dolinsky
It's actually quite easy to spin up multiple servers from a pre-existing
Rackspace image via the API. The initial POST to create the server returns the
password, which your script could either capture, or you could send a PUT
command to the /servers/id URI to update the root pass to be whatever you want
it to be.

~~~
AngryParsley
I didn't know that. Thanks for the correction.

That's not my only reason for preferring EC2 for lots of short-lived servers.
I left out some anecdotes.

Four months ago, one of my coworkers booted 12 cloud servers in DFW. I later
discovered that 3 of them were on the same physical hardware. Two months ago,
about 55 of 60 servers actually came up in ORD. Others were inaccesible or
hung. Not even hard reboots helped. We had to kill them and start new ones.

I've had a total of 2 EC2 instances die on me. I admit my usage of the two
providers is quite different. The stuff on EC2 is shorter-lived. But I'm
pretty sure that high turnover on other providers would cause a lot more
grief.

~~~
lepht
I've seen literally dozens of unresponsive and defective EC2 instances over
the last year. This was spawning 100s of medium and large instances per day,
with an average instance lifetime of around 3 hours.

From what I've read during my usage of AWS over the last couple of years, this
is more the norm than the exception.

~~~
AngryParsley
I think we agree then. Dozens out of 36,000+ instances is a very low failure
rate. I haven't had nearly that volume so I've only experienced 2 failures on
EC2.

------
gfodor
For what it's worth, I ran a trivially complex system on Rackspace cloud about
a year ago and it was a total clusterfuck. My machines were rebooted all the
time and I would receive e-mails saying they were rebooted by Rackspace
because of infrastructure issues or maintenence. I'd say this happened once
every 2-3 weeks and I was only running 3 servers. This was a hobby project so
to have to drop what I was doing every 2-3 weeks to reinitialize a server was
a huge pain. I eventually shut it all down and switched to Linode just so I
didn't have to worry about them randomly rebooting my machines all the time.

I've ran much larger clusters on EC2 over the last several years (50+ servers)
and can count on my fingers the times that machines have been rebooted. And
when they have, it's due to a lightning strike or a AWS failure that's
reasonably explainable.

------
cylo
Rackspace lets you burst CPU, whereas Amazon EC2 does not. It's not terribly
surprising that Rackspace is performing better in that area.

What you need to be careful about is the fact that EC2 and Rackspace Cloud are
currently in two different leagues when it comes to controlling your
instances. Amazon has a far better control panel (not to mention the API) for
exercising granular control of your instances. Hard drive space is dynamically
scalable on Amazon whereas it is not on Rackspace (their solution of mounting
Rackspace Cloud Files via FUSE is unacceptable).

The monitoring system for EC2 is also far better, and completely non-existent
on Rackspace unless you pay them $99/mo out of pocket on top of your hourly
usage charges.

All in all, my Rackspace experience left a very bad taste in my mouth when
dealing with their support, and it was a culmination of the small and simple
things that left me frustrated (the lack of pv_grub support out of the box,
etc., etc.) and kept me on EC2 despite the lack of CPU bursting.

~~~
aidos
I've used both fairly extensively now and there are definitely pros and cons
to each. I haven't done any solid benchmarking, but RS feels faster. It's also
much easier/faster to get up and running whereas AWS has a bit of a barrier to
entry. While at times I've been given incorrect info from them it's great to
be able to get support staff on the live chat.

I wouldn't necessarily choose it for all applications though. The AWS
architecture is far more flexible in general. Elastic IPs are invaluable when
it comes to creating a system that can grow over time (seamlessly switch from
a single instance to several fronted by a load balancer in a couple of
minutes). Being able to take complete snapshots of your system on an hourly
basis could well save your business one day. Being able to make a couple of
API calls to attach an extra 1 TB drive to your instance? That's worth losing
a little horsepower over.

It all depends on what you're after; with Rackspace you probably get a faster
machines, but that's at the expense of being able to build a more robust
generic solution for your needs.

------
jfb
We're on Rackspace, and getting murdered by a couple of things:

1\. Not being able to idle a system, or to restore from a system image (some
persistent bug on their side w/r/t setting netmasks on external interfaces, of
all things);

2\. Not being able to buy disk independently of RAM.

We were moved from DFW to ORD and since then, we haven't seen the random weird
outages that had me pulling out my hair. It hasn't been bad enough to make me
want to move to EC2/some other hosting company, but I do look longingly at,
say, spot instances, which would be a perfect tool for some of our problems.
I'd love it if FreeBSD worked correctly, but I'd also like a pony, so what the
hell.

~~~
seats
#1 doesn't sound right to me. You should be able to create Cloud Files
persisted backups and use them to launch new instances even after the original
parent is gone.

Granted there could be some extenuating circumstance for your specific setup,
but I think typically that scenario is supported out of the box.

~~~
jfb
It's a fairly specific case, yeah. We've automated image construction, but
it's still a PITA compared to just spinning up a new instance.

That said, there are always bigger fish to fry.

------
jcsalterego
When Cloud Servers work, they work great.

The pricing and build-out structure is linear when looking at RAM & disk
space, so this may or may not fit everyone's requirements. There is no EBS-
equivalent, and load balancing has just been introduced formally into the
control panel recently. The persistency is something I've taken advantage of,
compared to EC2's ephemeral nature (unless one employs EBS).

As for cloud servers going down randomly, Rackspace Roulette can be tough, and
the only silver lining is it provides a good incentive to build (or at least,
to think about) applications which work around failure.

There is one other lesser known gotcha which is max RAM capacity per account;
I think the default is something like 50GB and if you require more (for burst
perhaps), you have to get this amount pre-approved. Apparently this is to
safeguard against (accidental) abuse of the Cloud Servers API, but it's
probably also a good mechanism for capacity planning on their side. At any
rate, I've seen/heard the turnaround to be about a couple of business days.

One the flip side, there was a very active thread a while back about how
Mixpanel moved away from RS: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1884685>

EDIT: One more note about RS -- resizing cloud servers. It's a great ability
to have, but it can be slow. It tends to take longer the more data you have
(not too surprising). A good practice is to wipe unnecessary log files before
resizing, as I've been told that each resize action actually causes the cloud
server to jump to another physical host. Don't quote me though, I'm just on
the Internet :)

------
DarkShikari
_I chose the cheapest option on Rackspace, a 1GB 32-bit Windows 2003 server
that costs $0.08 per hour, which works out to $59 per month. Significantly
less than the $90 a mini-server costs on Amazon._

Is that supposed to be cheap? I used EC2 for some compute tasks a week ago; it
was 23 cents per hour for an x86_64 8-core 2.16Ghz i7 system with 8 gigabytes
of RAM -- which sounds way more than 3 times as powerful as the system they
mention.

Running on "burst CPU" doesn't sound like a very useful strategy when I need
to load a few dozen cores for a few days.

~~~
lreeves
Choosing Windows on either Amazon or Rackspace adds quite a bit to the cost,
and it rules out using the very cheap instances (micro and what not).

~~~
danhak
Windows 2003 micro instances have been available for quite some time now on
EC2.

~~~
lreeves
Ah, didn't realize that.

------
latch
For one of our sites, we ran unixbench on EC2, Linode and StormCloud
(LiquidWeb)..and I can tell you that EC2 wasn't the best value with respect to
price/performance (not by a lot).

I can also tell you that having not picked EC2, I have, more than once, wished
for Feature X offered by Amazon. Maybe Rackspace Cloud offers a comparative
list of addons/products, so my point might not be too relevant. But, my point
is that price/performance shouldn't be the only determining factor.

------
acangiano
An in-depth performance comparison published by an independent third-party:
[http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-
cloud-s...](http://www.thebitsource.com/featured-posts/rackspace-cloud-
servers-versus-amazon-ec2-performance-analysis/) Rackspace Cloud appears to
perform much better than EC2 in the States.

~~~
jread
This study was sponsored by Rackspace. It is based entirely on 2 benchmarks -
iozone and linux kernel compilation time.... not exactly a thorough study. It
also only tests m1 instances and ephemeral storage. Not a great study imo.

------
psadauskas
The biggest reason I've stuck with EC2 is that no other provider provides many
hundreds of GB of disk space like EC2 does. Even the smallest "tiny" EC2 node
can have 1TB of EBS attached to it.

~~~
moe
Yes, this is indeed a big deal and (as far as I know) unmatched so far.

EBS has been getting a lot of bad rap recently (most of it deserved), but
being able to juggle detachable, snapshot'able 1TB-volumes for $100 a shot has
still been a game-changer for many companies.

------
staunch
Honest question: could this just be because no one is on Rackspace?

~~~
seats
There is definitely a different target customer and that matters. Rackspace
customers are more likely to be classically architected n-tier web sites/apps
and AWS customers are more likely to be fully "cloud architected".

The result of this difference is that a Rackspace cloud physical host is not
going to be as heavily taxed resource-wise (at least on average). Add to that
the cpu burst by default versus cpu cap by default and cpu is definitely the
one area where differences will be widest.

One thing I will say though, and many may disagree with this, but I have yet
to see a benchmarking study that I'd trust. Real world operating performance
of a server is just a very complex thing and any attempt to distill it down to
single parameter comparison is going to compromise some element of that
complexity. I can show you comparison studies that show any of the cloud
providers to be better than the others, including AWS, Rackspace, Linode,
Joyent, etc. So take these things with a grain of salt.

~~~
calpaterson
> ny attempt to distill it down to single parameter comparison is going to
> compromise some element of that complexity

This is extremely true not just of this but of comparison in general. Turning
something complicated into a natural number below 100 and then using > and <
is pretty limited.

------
nicpottier
My practical experience does not agree. I've actually started moving off of
Rackspace cloud because I find that sometimes it is super slow. No such
problems with EC2 in three years of use.

The new Micro instances on EC2 make it a no-brainer.. really.

------
mjs
I more or less understand the reasons, but I do think it unfortunate and weird
that the companies offering cloud services price them on some combination of
RAM, disk space and bandwidth--CPU performance doesn't really figure, except
occasionally in vague terms, and neither does disk access speed.

RAM is important, sure, but there should be some way to quantify the expected
CPU performance as well.

------
mike_esspe
Can anyone explain why cloud hosting is so expensive? I can get i7 quad core
with 8 Gb RAM for $60/month from dedicated servers providers, but i can't find
comparable price with cloud hosting.

~~~
SergeyHack
Could you share where you get these prices?

~~~
mike_esspe
Hetzner: <http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq4> (you
should be outside of eurozone to get -19% VAT from the price)

Server4you: <http://server4you.net/root-server/> (haven't tested them yet)

~~~
SergeyHack
Thanks.

BTW, server4you have a lot of horrible stories. Hetzner reviews are better,
but it's important to understand that this deal hardware is of "desktop
quality" and not as reliable as "standard server" one. And it is in Germany.

~~~
mike_esspe
Brand servers won't get you reliability, only failover and replication will :)

In US servers are a bit more expensive, but you can get similar configuration
for around $100/month (e.g. burstnet)

~~~
SergeyHack
In fact I think so too. But I suppose there are some cases for some people
when the brand hardware would be better.

------
TillE
Tangentially, I was just looking at the possibility of hosting a file on
Amazon S3, and it's astonishing how expensive it is. They want $0.15/GB for
bandwidth.

In contrast, Linode sells bandwidth for $0.10/GB, and that comes with a whole
VPS. So if I pay $160/month, I get 16TB of bandwidth on a VPS with 4GiB of RAM
and 128GiB of storage (oh, and Linode pools your bandwidth across all nodes).
On S3, $160 will buy me a little over 10TB of bandwidth, nevermind storage or
anything else.

I understand that these cloud services are the most convenient way to scale,
and probably the best way to absorb an unexpected spike in usage. But they
seem to charge a roughly 50% premium for every resource, as compared to a
reliable VPS provider with great customer service, an API that lets you set up
temporary servers, etc.

~~~
KrisJordan
Linode to S3 is not apples to apples. If you want to compare to S3 you would
need multiple linode boxes and a system for redundancy in the face of image
corruption or hardware failure.

One of the things you are paying for with S3 is a pretty solid guarantee that
your files will A) not get lost and B) always be available.

~~~
moe
_B) always be available._

That's a relative term, though. While complete outages are rare, there are
frequent, prolonged periods of abysmal performance (latency in the >300ms
range, throughput approaching <50 MBit/s) and the average performance without
CloudFront isn't stellar either.

However, for many use-cases the sheer convenience and low cost of entry trump
these issues.

------
simonhamp
<http://www.lesslettuce.co.uk/> is running on Rackspace cloud and we've not
had any problems whatsoever with it. Got nothing to compare it against though,
haven't tried EC2. But this makes me glad we went with RS in the first place!

~~~
mtogo
There's one of these every week. Someone is using either Rackspace or EC2,
switches to the other, and talks about how the original is terrible.

It seems pretty split as to who likes which provider. Don't let one blog post
sway your opinion too much.

------
prakash
At Cedexis, we compared cloud performance using 15 billion measurements from
actual end-users in 220 countries and 23,800 networks between:

\- Amazon, Rackspace, Joyent, Google App Engine and Azure and

\- How do EC2's East, West, EU & APAC zones compare

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1898990/76-marty-kagan.pdf>

Drop me a note if you are interested in additional information, a similar test
for your website -- prakash at cedexis.com

------
justinwi
Shameless plug: we recently launched a service to help folks discover and
evaluate different cloud computing offerings. In addition to Rackspace & EC2,
you might consider Linode, GoGrid, SoftLayer and a small pile of others.

It's free and includes benchmarking and pricing data into it's
recommendations.

[http://www.oncompare.com/categories/cloud-
computing/decision...](http://www.oncompare.com/categories/cloud-
computing/decisions/new)

------
jjm
How does Rackspace compare with say Joyent? I'm cross shopping for some more
CPU. I've been a very long EC2 user/developer.

------
djjose
I've used both and performance-wise my team didn't see any drastic
differences. We switched to EC2 mostly because of RightScale (which now also
runs over top of RackSpace). It's not cheap, but running on RightScale has
made server maintenance and scaling a breeze for us. If this is a pain on your
team, I recommend them.

------
JonasH
Does anyone have experience with <http://www.cloudsigma.com/>? They seem like
a nice alternative for european companies. It would be interesting to see a
comparison with Amazon and Rackspace.

~~~
cloudsigma
Please have a look at:

<http://www.cloudsigma.com/en/our-cloud/how-we-compare> (feature comparison)

<https://cloudsleuth.net/web/guest/global-provider-view> (select Europe for a
comparison of our cloud performance against other providers)

------
StavrosK
I'm considering a server provider for a new startup I'm working on, but the
recent EBS issues of Amazon have put me off it entirely. Would you suggest I
reconsider? What are your experiences with AWS?

~~~
jread
You also have the option to use ephemeral storage if you prefer not to deal
with EBS. All instances provide ephemeral storage with the exception of
t1.micro.

~~~
jjm
If he's dealing with EBS he probably doesn't want to use ephemeral and the
fact that not persistent.

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epynonymous
wait a minute, i've been using a fedora instance on rackspace with 256 MB
memory, it's much less than $60 a month.

------
jonursenbach
Just guessing here, but the reason Rackspace Cloud is probably more performant
than EC2 is probably because EC2 is more utilized than Rackspace.

------
jsprinkles
There was a comparison about a year ago that tested performance over a week
span. Linode performed better than Rackspace Cloud and that fits my
experiences. No Windows so not helpful to Dave but worth looking at.

<http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison/>

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imagetic
Isn't the word "cloud" is just an expensive way to sell shared hosting?

~~~
ceejayoz
If you're on a shared host that provides root access, I suggest you find a new
host.

------
bkmrkr
no comments?

~~~
jcsalterego
waaaait for it...

