EC2: Advantange Over Data Center

Written by Nick Otter.

Contents

Introduction

Welcome to “Advantage Over Data Center”. We’re looking at AWS EC2 today. Let’s take a look at each of it’s features and compare with our old friend, The DC.

HA

AWS offers a minimum of 3 Availability Zones (data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region) per Region (North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, Australia and New Zealand).

Result: We have to chalk this up as a draw versus a Data Center. DC resource is available in all these regions also. But would you have to go multi-vendor for your High Availability estate? Most probably.

AWS 1 - 1 Data Center

CPU Power

EC2 offers “Amazon Graviton2 processors”. Hmm.

  • 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores
  • Each core is a single-threaded vCPU.
  • always-on fully encrypted DRAM memory,
  • hardware acceleration for compression workloads,
  • dedicated engines per vCPU
  • int8/fp16 CPU-based machine learning inference acceleration.
  • Customize number of vCPUs when launching new instances

Result: Okay let’s speed this up it’s cheaper than AMD and Intel and most probably the DC you want to use will not have top spec servers.

AWS 2 - 1 Data Center

High Throughput Low Latency

Cluster Compute, Cluster GPU, and High Memory Cluster instances.. I would describe these as cute bundles. Nifty.

Definite score.

Result: AWS 3 - 1 Data Center

Multiple Storage Options

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) optimized instances for IOPS. This is just a block storage volume right? So, just increasing the disk size? Err. No goals scored here.

Auto Scaling

The equivalent of AWS EC2 Auto Scaling would be to write your own custom Terraform wrapper maybe (been there!) - or just bite the bullet and Go Big or Go Home in VCenter. Big win for AWS EC2 here.

Result: AWS 4 - 1 Data Center

ELB

Automatic Traffic Distribution with Elastic Load Balancing. Is there anyone who longs to use Citrix? Who wishes to have a totally separate vendor for a specific LB resource? Logging in in a spearate window to an LB GUI? Win for AWS.

Result: AWS 5 - 1 Data Center

VPC

This is another big win IMHO. It is incredibly hard to get a network overview - there may be multiple vendors, multiple gateways, separate firewalls etc. etc. and then on top of that you might be fumbling around with nmcli config. Not great.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the Amazon Web Services Cloud where you can launch Amazon Web Services resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways

Result: AWS 6 - 1 Data Center

Elastic IP

Managing IPs via Terraform/VCenter/Citrix Netscaler/Whatever other crazy idea is a nuisance and can be far from “Elastic”. arp -a or netcat/nmap will never not be fun but also not totally robust.

Result: AWS 7 - 1 Data Center

OS Choice

This is a draw. Nice to have, sure. But these .iso’s are free yaknow.

Conclusion

Result: AWS 7 - 1 Data Center. Bit of a pasting.

Thanks. This article was written by Nick Otter.