Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

AWS console is very carefully designed to let you create traps that result in spending huge buckets of money if you're not paying attention.


EC2 instances are fairly predictable.


And when they fail (especially when the underlying hardware fails... Does AWS live migrate your workloads with zero downtime like Google?


Google can’t migrate if the underlying hardware fails quick enough.

I don’t think AWS has talked about live migrate, but given stability of their VMs and rareness of “we need to restart it notices”, it seems like they have something.


I've "experienced" a hard drive failure on both platforms.

On AWS, I was getting pagerduty'd because the solo gateway box was down, we couldn't ssh in so after an hour of no progress with dubugging or support, we just hit the reset button and hoped for the best. Fortunately this worked and later we where told there has a disk failure.

On GCP, I didn't even know and only discovered it in the logs when I was looking for other audit reasons. Turns out your long-running google VMs are being migrated all of the time and you had no idea. They actually have a policy / SLA around it, basically saying they refresh their entire fleet of servers every 6 weeks iirc. Honestly, if AWS is not doing something like this, I'd have increased concerns about leaky security neighbors (i.e. someone who has a VM running for multiple years without software updates. Hopefully you should be protected on shared servers, but it is software afterall)


Right, both vendors need to keep the underlying hypervisor and physical host up to date.


If you're only using EC2 you're overspending by a factor of 5-10. Compute is cheap.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: