Amazon EC2 vs Rackspace. Are all cloud hosting services the same?
Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 5:20PM About a year and a half ago we began using Amazon EC2 to host our services. Everything was perfect until the quantity of users started to grow and we started adding new services.
We've realized that the performance of the instances was decreasing fast and we needed to scale. But before starting to create a more complex architecture, we thought that it could be a good idea to take a look at Rackspace. And we were right.
Before starting to compare I would like to clarify that both services are excelent and that the final decision was based on the results we've got in our tests which are based on our needs. Other companies with other needs might reach different conclusions.
We have evaluated five areas: Price, Performance, Simplicity, Functionality and Customer Service.
Price
In a first view, the pricing looks similar, but when you start going in detail you start realizing that the pricing is not as similar as it looks.
While in Rackspace users have many options starting 1.5 cents an hour, in Amazon EC2 you have less options in term of machine sizes. We are in a position where EC2 instances are either too big or too small for our needs, while in Rackspace we've found the place in the middle that we were looking for.
Also the price of the storage might look similar, but it is not. If you have a 100 Gb disk in Amazon EC2 (EBS volume) and you make a backup (EBS Snapshot), Amazon charges you 100 Gb, it does not matter if you are using only 50 Gb. Rackspace create images according to the space you really use, not according to the allocated space. Rackspace does not charge customers with i/o operations as Amazon does.
Performance
Performance itself is not an issue, since in the cloud you can always get to the place you need. What matters is the performance you get per dollar you spend. We performed a test in different Rackspace cloud servers until we reached similar levels of performance than the one we had in the production EC2 instances. We've realized that we would be paying about 30% less money in Rackspace. So the performance per dollar is better in Rackspace.
Simplicity
Amazon EC2 is not the simplest service people can get. It has many different possibilities to create instances and many different new acronyms to learn. Once you know how it works, it's extremely easy, but the learning process was not what we were hoping. It took us several weeks to get everything working the way we wanted.
Rackspace is extremely easy to learn. We got it working in a matter of hours. In Rackspace everything is very natural. A server is a server, not an instance. A server image is a server image, not an AMI. A hard disk is a hard disk, not an EBS volume. A backup is a backup, not an EBS snapshot; etc.
Functionality
We found that Amazon offers more functionality out of the box (in a manner of speaking). To start, users can choose to create servers from public images which can be pre-installed with anything. Rackspace offers you a more limited set of options, but they are rather popular so you can probably get what you need.
A very important point for Amazon is the built-in Firewall. Your servers are protected by a separated firewall from scratch, while in Rackspace you need to configure it yourself.
The Cloud watch service in Amazon is very powerful. In Rackspace the monitoring tool is more limited and you will probably end up using a separated tool.
Amazon has a much broader offer of cloud services than Rackspace and you are not obliged to use them. In Rackspace you need to do most of the stuff by yourself. Which in our case is not a problem because we have a non-stadard architecture.
Customer Service
EC2 was working without interruptions during a year and a half, so we did not need to contact customer support at any time. But we did have many questions at the beginning that required hours reading forums and documentation.
With Rackspace we were just blown away with the service quality. Whenever we had a question, we clicked on "Live Chat" and we got an answer. Every live chat session saves us several minutes or hours of reading web pages or pdf documents.
Conclusion
In our case we have decided to move from Amazon EC2 to Rackspace. The customer service is simply brilliant and we have increased the size of our servers 50% without increasing the monthly cost.
If you have any questions or need a clarification, please let me your comment!
The author of this blog is part of the team who created the first Electriccar Simulator for iPhone called iEV. With this iPhone App people is able to know which Electric Car is good for them before buying one, helping them to save money.
Amazon EC vs Rackspace in Cloud Computing, Technology
Reader Comments (13)
I agree with your points raised, and like your price/performance analysis.
It's also important to understand that on EC2 you only have access to private IP addresses, whereas with Rackspace cloud servers you get the 'real deal'. However, this comes at the expense of having to implement your own Rackspace firewall, as mentioned in the article.
I'm seriously looking at implementing Rackspace hybrid hosting - using dedicated hardware for firewall, load balancer and DBs, with cloud servers for cheap web nodes. I should be able to speed test too (mixing dedicated and cloud web nodes), without risking live site performance degradation.
Thanks for your contribution John!
We haven't analyzed the hybrid hosting for a now, but we are planning to do it in the future.
So far our experience with Rackspace has been great. We are more than happy using the service.
Don't forget the entire suite of services you get from EC2 that Rackspace doesn't touch.
SimpleQueueSService, CloudFormation, S3, SimpleDB, SimpleNotificationService, Elastic MapReduce, RDS...
Comparing simple machine instances alone is not valid when comparing a 'cloud service'. Amazon is completely dominating in this space right now.
Also, not sure if Rackspace offers a free tier like AWS does.
Thanks for you comment Darren!
The comparison is based on our needs. We don't need all these services that Amazon offers. Other companies might find Amazon service more appealing because of this.
The fact that Amazon is the leader has driven us to use EC2 during the last year and a half, but right now Amazon has a more mature competition and Rackspace is a good example.
Also I don't think that using Amazon's entire set of services is a good idea. It makes migration from Amazon to other service more difficult. We were able to migrate everything quickly because we were not using any of these services. But cloud services standardization is an entire different story.
Thanks again for your comment!
Amazon certainly does innovate with more exotic technologies, but I would question how many (if any) of these are applicable for typical scenarios. If you know that you just need a Windows/Linux platform with storage and bandwidth, then this article sums it up nicely.
Good point about Amazon's free offering though!
Thanks for the good write-up. We had used Amazon EC2 ourselves and used it in our marketing to potential clients; but, reliability is of the utmost importance with hosting SAS and we will probably also use Rackspace or another competitor to offer triple redundancy. The idea of hybrid makes a ton of sense in case Amazon EC2 goes down again et cetera.
Thanks for your contribution Tim!
You can read my experience with both in my author url :)
Nice post. I found this articles which compares Caspio, Amazon, Database.com, and Microsoft SQL cloud database services
http://blog.caspio.com/web-database/comparing-cloud-database-services/
Actually, I'd just like to correct a minor point here:
This is not true - when creating a snapshot of an EBS volume, the data is compressed, so it won't actually store 100gb, and you'll only get charged for how much was used in compressed form.
Additionally, subsequent snapshots of the same volume only store the differences from the previous snapshot, saving you even more money.
Thanks for the contribution Tenebrous.
This post is about a year old. In that moment the bills we were receiving from Amazon were showing the complete allocation in the final price. It's good to see that competition is making cloud services better and cheaper.
Thanks again!
Thanks for the writeup Guillermo... very interesting and helpful.
So you're a year down the road now since writing this blog entry. How are you feeling about Rackspace now? Still happy with everything?
Thanks for the round-up of information. I think we will go wiith Rackspace.