
EC2 Dedicated Hosts - jeffbarr
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-ec2-dedicated-hosts/
======
jorangreef
I have been with Hetzner since 1999, and I have hosted with AWS for 2 or 3
years, before moving back to Hetzner, and I keep wondering when AWS will have
anything to match Hetzner's price/performance.

Someone from AWS proactively called me up out of the blue the other day to ask
for input and to interview me about what I need, and offered to quote. I
received a phone call or two and two emails and after mentioning the exact
specs and price I get from Hetzner, and being genuinely interested in perhaps
getting a competitive quote, I waited and received no reply for some time and
then the following:

"I'm sorry for my late response. I’ve been pretty busy these days…"

"I had a look at what your technical specifications below and I'd like to
understand a bit more what type of business you're doing."

"One of AWS's main strengths lies in the scalability of our platform."

"How much is the % of usage of your dedicated server? What happens if it
reaches the maximum usage? At AWS, you can start with smaller instances and
use auto-scaling to scale up or down automatically according to your traffic."

"Is scalability a challenge for you?"

There was no quote attached. :)

Hetzner's price/performance is an elephant in the room it seems.

~~~
res0nat0r
How do you handle massive traffic spikes? Hetzner seems fine for small project
/ personal / small company websites with predictable load and people who have
no problem spending time setting up all of their services they need
themselves, it really just sounds like you just aren't the customer AWS wants
to attract.

~~~
jorangreef
"How do you handle massive traffic spikes?"

Well, how would you handle massive traffic spikes? Through a combination of
vertical and horizontal scaling? Through having excess capacity? Except that I
would probably want to start with something fast and inexpensive to begin
with.

If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too
late.

I don't follow your line of reasoning, you seem to suggest that to build a
scalable service you yourself would prefer to use servers with necessarily
poor price/performance?

Or are you saying that it's not possible to use dedicated machines to build a
scalable service? Or that one should only use VMs, with their inefficiency and
resource contention? How do you reason about disk seek performance? What
happens when the spike hits, and another AWS customer on the box starts
stealing CPU?

Actually, traffic spikes were the reason we moved off AWS. A single dedicated
machine at Hetzner gives 10x the headroom at a fraction of the cost. That buys
you time and capacity when you need it.

~~~
LoSboccacc
> If you wait until the spike hits before you spin up your VM you're still too
> late.

precisely. this is the other elephant in the AWS room. the only way to survive
a spike without service degradation while vm spin up on that platform is
through lambdas/s3 served pages/api gateway - but even lambdas lag behind
traffic.

but then you need to build your whole architecture for it

anyway I'm running on AWS right now, but for other advantages and services,
not for its scalability/price performance.

~~~
ownagefool
Baking your images and set your scaling thresholds lower should be able to
largely deal with that.

The thing is though, the scaling is nice but most folks just want the auto-
recovery. You stick your app over 3 zones, you have autoscaling and you can
run with a couple of Ops savy devs and largely forget about it.

You no longer need to pay for that dedicated sysadmin who knows how to manage
a datacentre when have a small number of technical staff. The extra hosting
bills are less than hiring that other person.

~~~
LoSboccacc
precisely. recoverable multi zone postgres without paying a sysadmin. we can
manage basic maintenance on our own, but setting up something like that
require a skilled consultant in short burst at each upgrade/maintenance check,
and for a small operation like ours it's too expensive if we want to match
what amazon gives.

we do have a custom AMI that just fetch and build the latest snapshot release
when we need auto-scaling or auto-recovery, but our real problem is that we
currently depend on sticky session, so users accumulated on the initial
instances get sucky performances. (and yes we are currently working on fixing
it, we cannot outright serialize sessions on dynamo because, reasons)

------
andrewstuart2
Man, I'd really like to just see bare metal from them. To me that was part of
the allure of containers -- so much more efficient than multiple VMs and yet
you get a lot of similar benefits, as long as you don't mind some security
tradeoffs.

Running ECS is cool and all, and I know they do some container-specific VM
optimizations, but I still know I'm running a kernel on a kernel, even if my
VMs happen to share a host. I'd love seeing the flexibility of the ECS
software, but on metal.

~~~
bonobo3000
Would you mind explaining a little about how bare metal is different from
this? Isn't a dedicated host a real physical machine?

~~~
chrisseaton
No I think it's still virtualised isn't it? But on a machine that they
guarantee only you are using?

~~~
benley
Yes. The key is that you can control exactly what combination of your own VMs
land on each physical machine.

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triggercut
This is great for (warning: potentially limited use case ahead) engineering
companies* who run large analysis clusters for specialty Simulation/CFD
software. Especially those frustrated by their vendors current or (non-
existent) cloud processing offerings.

A lot of software in this space, for instance, has a fixed MAC address
requirement for their license servers, and you report/pay depending on the
number of cores. Whilst you can get around that sometimes, it would certainly
void agreements and wouldn't hold up in an audit.

In some companies I've worked, this could drastically reduce the capital costs
for engineers needing overpowered workstations that are analogous to Ferraris
you only take out on weekends.

*who are already using AWS in other parts of their infrastructure.

~~~
laurencerowe
Wouldn't you still see a virtualized network interface with random MAC address
from the VM within the dedicated host where the software is running?

You could configure an Elastic Network Interface to have a fixed MAC address,
but that would also work without dedicated hosts.

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abrookewood
How exactly is this different from Dedicated Instances (which have been around
for years)? "Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that run on single-
tenant hardware dedicated to a single customer. They are ideal for workloads
where corporate policies or industry regulations require that your EC2
instances be physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances
that belong to other customers. Dedicated Instances let you take full
advantage of the benefits of the AWS cloud – on-demand elastic provisioning,
pay only for what you use, all while ensuring that your Amazon EC2 compute
instances are isolated at the hardware level."

~~~
Sanddancer
This basically lets you have an entire machine dedicated to a specific type of
VM instance, plus have the underlying hardware information, to ease licensing
requirements that certain programs and operating systems have. So you can get
a box of m4.larges and know exactly what programs are running on it; for
example, RedHat offers per-vm server licensing, so running 20 instances on
RHEL on your dedicated box just costs you the flat rate VM host cost.

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wildparrot
Sadly there is still no IPV6 support...

~~~
lwhalen
This should be higher up. It's time for end-to-end IPv6 functionality on all
major service providers and applications.

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boulos
Interesting:

> each Dedicated Host can accommodate one or more instances of a particular
> type, all of which must be the same size

I'm surprised by the "same size" requirement. It seems like even if you ask
customers to stay within a single family (m3, m4, etc.) the customer could do
their own hand placement of 8 vCPUs next to a pair of 4s...

Edit: Disclaimer, I work on Compute Engine.

~~~
duskwuff
Is it possible that's been going on the whole time? Allowing different flavors
of guests to cohabitate has few benefits (at their scale) and many drawbacks;
I wouldn't be surprised if they simply never allowed it.

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knite
What's the networking model? Will two instances on the same host talk over the
datacenter network, or will the traffic stay local to the machine?

~~~
mentat
Given placement groups I'd expect 10 GB local networking as this is the same
thing.

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jwrigh13
Now how long will it take for Amazon to release a dedicated host marketplace
where you can sell unused space on your dedicated hosts?

~~~
dandroid1
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of obtaining a dedicated host?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Technically, its the equivalent of a leaseback. It may make sense depending on
the profitability of the arbitrage you're targeting.

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20years
Can anyone give me the advantages of choosing an EC2 dedicated host over going
with a true dedicated server?

~~~
MBCook
All the rest of your infrastructure is in AWS and you want the high
interconnect speeds.

~~~
wmf
This shouldn't be any faster than normal EC2.

(Edit: I may have misunderstood the comment. This will certainly have a faster
interconnect to EC2 compared to a non-EC2 dedicated server.)

~~~
jonknee
No, but if you need a dedicated server in addition to other EC2 hosts it will
certainly be faster to be in a AWS data center.

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fideloper
Some pro/cons that would be interesting to discuss:

Other than licensing, an advantage I'm guessing is in reducing noisy neighbor
affects. In our case, we use a lot of t2.micro instances, which seem to suffer
from this.

A disadvantage is that the instances within a dedicated host might all go down
together? (similar to if you put all your instances in us-east-1e and 1e goes
down?, or of course if all of us-east goes down). Although I'm not sure a
dedicated host itself is more likely to go down, while a datacenter remains
operational. That's what I'm most interested in knowing - how do these fail?

~~~
jeffbarr
We monitor the health of the host; take a look at
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicated...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicated-
hosts-monitoring.html) to learn more.

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nowarninglabel
No one's mentioned this as a potential use case, so wondering if other people
have a way to solve a problem I have...we spin up EC2 instances on the fly for
running tests, but some of those require a dedicated IP address to deal with a
vendor integration. Seems like a dedicated host might solve that, though
perhaps not worth the cost. Is there some other way people solve this problem?
We currently have an in-house box just for running those IP limited tests.

~~~
jeremyjh
Yes - its called Elastic IP. You can have a dedicated IP address and associate
it on-the-fly to regular EC2 instances. You pay a small monthly fee if you are
not actively using it.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-i...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-
ip-addresses-eip.html)

~~~
nowarninglabel
The problem with Elastic IP, from my understanding, was that I often need to
spin up say a dozen instances for a short period of time, but otherwise don't
need the IPs, so it seemed it would end up costing to have those all available
but only temporarily in use...though adding up the cost, it'd only be $45 a
month (12 * 0.005 * 24 * 30) so perhaps that's not a big deal.

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notnarb
To save a trip to the calculator:

$2.341 (m3 host / hour) * 24 hours * 30 days = $1685.52

before the "up to 70%" reservation discount.

~~~
shawabawa3
Bare in mind that can run up to 32 m3 instances

~~~
fidget
Which would be `$0.067 * 32 * 24 * 30 = $1543.68` on demand

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allendoerfer
Thanks to the amazing innovation at Amazon, 2016 will be the year, we can
finally have a real computer in a datacenter, where we can run all our
JavaScript code on, instead of of having to use an anonymous cloud service.

~~~
ycosynot
Maybe we could distribute the computing on these dedicated hosts, to have
like, virtual dedicated hosts. And then run them from Minecraft... It's the
future.

~~~
therein
You can implement the HTTP parse logic in Minecraft using redstone. Deploy
nginx or Apache Traffic Server in front of your Minecraft and you are good.

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ludbb
Are the hardware specs available somewhere? Is it possible I'm confusing this
with an interface for launching EC2 instances at a premium disguised as being
actual dedicated hardware?

~~~
jeffbarr
Each Dedicated Host is home to a specific number of EC2 instances.

Check out the EC2 instance types ([https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-
types/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/)) to learn more.

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idlewords
All the advantages of a dedicated server without the hassle of saving tons of
money.

~~~
jeffbarr
Many of our customers have asked for this feature so that they can run
software that is licensed for a particular piece of actual hardware.

~~~
cortesoft
So it is a feature designed for a silly license scheme?

~~~
blantonl
I don't mean this to sound condescending, but you have a lot to learn about
software licensing.

There are many software packages that are licensed to an individual peice of
hardware. Tied to that are USB authentication dongles, and even parallel port
dongles for some old school commercial software.

~~~
cortesoft
Yep, you sounded condescending.

I think after 25 years in the industry I know a lot about software licensing.
Enough to know that just because lots of software packages are licensed that
way doesn't change the fact that they are silly.

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nodesocket
If you setup a dedicated host, does that also include local SSD disks, or do
you have to still use EBS?

~~~
jeffbarr
A Dedicated Host contains EC2 instances. You would still use EBS if you need
storage other that what's available on the instances.

Per the EC2 Instance Types page ([https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-
types/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/)), many of the instance
types already include SSD storage.

~~~
nodesocket
Thanks Jeff for the response. Appreciate that you personally respond.

Wouldn't dedicated I/O be a big plus and selling point for dedicated
instances?

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jagger27
So this is for IO- and CPU-bound users who for some reason are also EC2-bound.

~~~
mikey_p
According to their docs/examples, this is mostly for legal reasons. i.e. some
software can be licensed to multiple VMs if they are all running on the same
host.

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imaginenore
That pricing is ridiculous though. I can get 15 Hetzner servers for the price
of one EC2.

~~~
bdcravens
It's more than a bare metal server - you're still running EC2 instances atop
of it, except only your instances are running on that server. Looking at the
price of the underlying instances if you run it fully loaded, it seems pretty
comparable running those instances non-dedicated.

~~~
imaginenore
So? It's still ridiculously expensive.

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grubles
So, how much different is this than Vultr's[0] offering?

[0][https://www.vultr.com/pricing/dedicatedcloud/](https://www.vultr.com/pricing/dedicatedcloud/)

