Why we ditched Amazon AWS

This is a pet peeve of mine, but when you are running your own servers in a datacenter, that is not &quot;your own cloud&quot;, it&#x27;s just your own servers.<p>I realize the cloud is just a marketing term and it doesn&#x27;t really mean something, but if I move my single heroku dyno app to my own dedicated server sitting in my basement, did I just move it to my own private cloud?

&quot;AWS is expensive, as soon as we start an instance, we’re billed for the entire hour, even if we only need to run a 2 minute test on it.&quot;<p>What you really needed to do was design algorithm that keeps machines running over period in time, according to a general trend. Not shutdown, and instantly bootup for every customer deciding to run tests.

For those unfamiliar with Amazon, Amazon AWS consists of over 25 different services. This article focuses on EC2, the virtual server service.<p>I use S3 and DynamoDB regularly and think the pricing is better than most. I don&#x27;t use it for pricing though. I use it because I don&#x27;t have to worry about load balancing, adding multiple servers, running out of disk space. Set it up and forget about it.

I&#x27;m confused. Noisy neighbors and the &quot;round up to the hour&quot; AWS billing can both be fixed by more active instance management. It&#x27;s not trivial but it&#x27;s also not incredibly complex. Moving completely off of AWS has huge ramifications for your business in the long run, some positive some negative, and it seems weird to make such a bold and disruptive move based upon two issues that are both well known and fairly straightforward to address.

That&#x27;s funny, I was just reading this blog post from Adrian Holovaty on some of the issues he ran into with deploying Python&#x2F;Django on Heroku and how great AWS has worked out for him with Soundslice:<p><a href="http://www.holovaty.com/writing/aws-notes/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.holovaty.com&#x2F;writing&#x2F;aws-notes&#x2F;</a><p>He just about had me sold.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;m definitely in the wanting to avoid sysadmin stuff if at all possible camp. Does anyone have any thoughts on AWS vs Heroku for Django? Does Adrian&#x27;s solution seem reasonable?

&quot;Noisy neighbors: sometimes instances would behave much slower than usual, because other people on the same hypervisor were using all the hypervisor’s resources&quot;<p>The Xen hypervisor actually has pretty good resource allocation between virtual machines, and although there are academic attacks [1], I&#x27;m interested to hear what evidence you&#x27;ve seen of neighbors hogging your resources.<p>[1] <a href="http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~rist/papers/rfa.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.cs.wisc.edu&#x2F;~rist&#x2F;papers&#x2F;rfa.pdf</a>

Blog down, clearly shouldn&#x27;t have ditched AWS

Looks like &quot;their cloud&quot; couldn&#x27;t handle Hacker News&#x27; traffic. Had they set up their blog in an AutoScaling group in EC2 this would not have been a problem :)

Ahhhh whew. I thought this was gonna be an article about people switching back to Heroku &amp; my blood was gonna get all angried up.<p>On the other hand, people wanting to set up their own server clusters... VMs... Linux container stuff... that&#x27;s heartwarming :)

I would encourage you to look at OpenVZ for anything Linux-based. Starts faster, uses less resources than KVM.<p>The gain might not be much however, given how powerful today&#x27;s CPUs are.

Any reason why you didn&#x27;t just OpenStack instead?

Awesome blog post Jochen! And thanks for the Gridcentric shout-out :-)

It better to say it doesn&#x27;t fit your business model.