Hi all -

Never tried AWS but played with Linode for some time, and I found Linode needs quite a bit of advance technical knowledge to use.

Just wondering- does Amazon AWS require similar level of technical knowledge or more/less?

Thanks!

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I've used both.

I found Amazon slightly more complicated (The temporary IP addresses thing can be confusing to some).

Nothing a few hours of formation can't fix, though.

What about using pre-configured image like this one https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B ... 3544889031 to setup a magento site in AWS?

Does AWS require lot of work after your site up, in terms of server maintenance/update/upgrade etc like Linode?

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There are more serious differences between our offerings, but EC2 is a Linux virtual machine just like Linode is. You're still going to be on the hook for maintaining and managing it.

-Chris

I've used both. Like Caker says comparing Linode to Amazon isn't easy because the two are utterly different.

AWS is far more complex to setup and it's hard work to figure out what it's going to cost you. AWS is more scalable and does some very nice things that Linode doesn't, like adding a terabyte of disk to a running machine for a start. It comes with a pile of complex but potentially useful bolt ons that Linode has no equivalent of.

Linode is simple, predictable, and has lower costs for normal usage patterns.

What's best for you depends on your usage case but if you just need a small server or two Linode is almost certainly cheaper.

I believe Linode support is also much more accessible than Amazon's support. Though I have never had to use Amazon's support.

I use both Linode and AWS. Linode is much, much easier.

I have an AWS EC2 server running, just for the wider geographical distribution of a specific webservice I'm creating (this is also distributed across my 3 Linodes, using a round-robin DNS entry). My Linode server is a lot easier to maintain and administrate than AWS, so for Linux-based virtual server, I'd prefer Linode any time.

By far, for a experienced linux admin Amazon is waaaaaaaaaaay more complicated.

Experienced guys, just want to go straight to his config files and edit them.

On Amazon, you need to find where you setup the things, setup a myriads of interface and access stuff and you pay the price for "for dummies stuff" and the "gui price". Thousands of screens and menus to access configs that consists only on edit a file and change one line.

I think you expend too much time to setup basic things. I hate it.

Just give my shell, because I am one of those guys who know what I am doing

But, besides that, I think is a very robust "ecosystem" where the services works fine, if you go to use dedicated services instead setup everything on a single server.

To me, if you just need a server and a shell, aws is not for you. But if you gonna use the services like the S3, Route 53, CloudFront, etc, you can have lots of beneficts.

I ran an environment in AWS for a few years, first through Rightscale and later with my own infrastructure design and management tools. It was VERY complicated to use if you wanted to avoid certain pitfalls (like Reddit tanking for a day, for example, when EBS died in a couple US-East AZs a couple years ago). I ran a mix of small & large EC2 instances for web & MSSQL, RDS for MySQL and later MSSQL, S3 for persistent storage, CloudFront for CDN, and ELB + Auto-Scaling to handle traffic spikes. All together, it was between 20 and 60 instances, depending on load, running out of multiple US-East AZs. I never had any downtime I didn't cause.

When it got to the point where I wanted to split the infrastructure not only across multiple AZs, but across multiple regions, we reevaluated and decided to go with a more traditional hosting method. The AWS infrastructure was VERY powerful but I was also the only one who came even close to understanding how it worked.

For someone comparing a single instance or a pair (web + db, for example) against running at Linode, I'd say you'd be in WAY over your head. There are already enough people over in Amazon's forums screaming that the data they uploaded to their instance disappeared when they restarted (disks are ephemeral unless you use EBS) because they didn't bother to read the first line of the docs. Trust me, if AWS is right for you, you'd already know.

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Jason Litka
Utter Ramblings

Thanks everyone. Really good insight.

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