

New Medium Instance, 64-bit bit Ubiquity, SSH Client - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/ec2-updates-new-instance-64-bit-bit-ubiquity-ssh-client.html

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pieter
64-bit small instances are perhaps the best new announcement. We now have two
different builds and AMI's for all our different node types, just so that we
can use a small instance when necessary and a large instance otherwise. We can
now drop half of our images and use 64-bit everywhere.

The medium instances are also very welcome, since previously the gap between
small and large was quite big (4x the memory for 4x the price).

~~~
garyrichardson
I remember being at a Cloud Unconference in Seattle about 2-3 years ago asking
for 64bit for all instance types. Actually, I think I begged for it. It took a
while, but I'm glad it's here now.

I would have to say, Amazon is at least receptive to suggestions. You can
always email or chat with Jeff Barr and make suggestions.

~~~
jeffbarr
Thanks Gary, I am always happy to listen to and to pass along suggestions. My
email is in my profile.

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teoruiz
We have most of our workload running on Rackspace Cloud Servers (UK) and the
more improvements AWS make, the more overpriced and ridiculously
underperforming the Rackspace offer becomes:

Underperforming: I don't get why the bigger Rackspace Cloud Servers don't get
more CPU cores, just a bigger share of the original 4 cores on the host
server. This might look fine but at the end I just want more processes (PHP
threads) running at the same time.

Overpriced: The pricing is really high for Cloud Servers. I'm paying around
£460 a month for a 16GB RAM Cloud Server (4 cores, 620GB (!) disk). For around
€448 I have a Rackspace dedicated server with 48GB RAM, 2 x 6 (modern) cores
and a 480GB RAID10 array.

I'm actually switching most of our workload to dedicated hardware, it's less
cool but it's just cheaper and faster, in this case.

NB: We tried AWS but the MySQL IO performance, either in EC2+EBS or RDS, was
not enough for us.

~~~
Erwin
I've been told by my Rackspace rep that they're working towards moving away
from VMWare and onto something else (based on their Open Stack system).

Supposedly (and take that with a grain of salt since this information is a few
layers removed) the current VMWare based cloud they have is limiting how
flexible they can be about their offering, i.e. every instance price level
just doubles everything and all but the 32G instance has 4 virtual cores. Once
they move to the new system supposedly you'll be able to mix & match things
more. Maybe their current cloud really requires homogenous hardware, I don't
know.

As for modern cores: Rackspace is somewhat conservative about what hardware
they offer, though you can get special order. My desktop i7 2600K has single-
thread performance that's essentially twice of the quad-core quad-CPU Xeon in
the "real" server. A place like Hetzner --
[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
pr...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
produktmatrix-ex) \-- offers a € 49 server using that.

As for AWS, isn't the way to "fix" that to use essentially striped EBS
volumes?

~~~
jarito
That's not quite right. Rackspace currently uses the Xen Hypervisor for public
Cloud, not VMWare. The new Cloud Servers (Nova) is based on the open source
OpenStack Compute (<http://openstack.org/projects/compute/>) code base. The
new Cloud Servers is in public beta right now for people to try out
([http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-cloud-servers-
powere...](http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-cloud-servers-powered-by-
openstack-beta/)).

The new Cloud Servers will have much greater flexibility and a better feature
set. It will help solve many issues that customers have with the current
offerings. That information will be coming out over the next couple of months,
but since we are only about two-weeks different from the OpenStack nova code
base, you can always look there for a preview.

Rackspace does offer a VMWare based private cloud
(<http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/private_cloud/>) for customers who
want virtualization, but on their own dedicated hardware. VMWare is not used
for public cloud (as far as I know).

Obvious Disclosure: I work at Rackspace and this is to the best of my
knowledge.

------
aaronharnly
Also: the MindTerm Java SSH client!

I can't think of too many cases in which I'd have my private key but no
terminal to SSH from, but I like having this option.

(Takes me back to bygone days of serving up MindTerm from my home computer
over dyndns, a convenient way to do what I needed to do from restrictive
school machines... Anyone else do that?)

------
Fizzer
This is exactly what I needed.

I'm currently using the Rackspace VM that gives 4gb of ram. I wanted to switch
to EC2 after they dropped prices, but I would have either had to drop down to
a small (1.7gb - not an option for my workload) or up to a large (7gb - costs
over $50/mo more).

With all of these improvements Amazon is making, Rackspace's VM offerings are
now horribly overpriced.

------
firemanx
These are welcome changes, but I really, really wish that new medium instance
had 2 or 4 cores. I would pay a bit more for that, and having a single core is
where many of our workloads really start to feel the pain, but we don't need
all of the power (or cost) or a large instance.

I understand the economics though - cores definitely cost a lot more than
memory, so perhaps its just wishful thinking.

EDIT: I should clarify - I know they already have the "High CPU Medium", but
it would be nice to have a step between that and the Large instance type that
had two cores, but slightly more memory.

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roquin
This is a great news. Before that, if you start with a small instance, there
is no way to upgrade to higher instance since they exclusively support 64-bit.
Now you can upgrade smoothly from micro to any instance.

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dpdp_
Go 64-bit!

A medium instance is actually a very nice option for small deployments.

Micro instances are throttled -[http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-
ec2-micro-instan...](http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-
instance-cpu-steal/). I, personally, do not maintain any 32-bit AMIs. The
offer gap between a micro and a large instance for 64 was large enough for me
to feel it.

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tyw
This is excellent, I was just complaining about the 32-bit-only medium high-
cpu instance types yesterday. Now I just wish they'd add another mid-range
instance with ~3.75 GB RAM and 2x2=4 or 2x2.5=5 CPU. Basically combine the
higher resources from each of the medium types.

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ComputerGuru
Typo in title: "64-bit bit Ubiquity"

Other than that, exciting news. EC2 has always been about being able to choose
a fitting solution for your particular needs, and this fills a niche.

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seldo
It's weird that they would introduce the Medium instance as "new", when it's
actually a return -- they used to have Medium instances a couple years ago,
and retired them.

~~~
firemanx
They've still had medium instances - I just spun up a few the other day. When
did they retire them?

~~~
lukeschlather
AWS has a couple classes of medium. For a complete list, go here:

<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/>

In the API, the new one is "m1.medium" . The one you spun up the other day was
probably a "c1.medium" .

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jl6
The first two changes feel related. What change do you suppose they made to
their infrastructure that has enabled these features?

