First let me say this isn’t an advertisement for Rackspace Cloud, but it will likely sound like one. In reality, this is more a post about the serious shortcomings of EC2.

That said, I switched hosts from EC2 to Rackspace cloud recently after a couple serious problems with EC2. I knew that EC2′s instances were not persistant. Knowing that, I, thankfully, made sure to have very extensive and very frequent backups that I kept in a couple places. What I didn’t realize is that EC2 has absolutely no support for the basic instance services. You can’t call, you can’t email, you can’t even put in a support ticket. The only support option you get is the ability to post to the user support community forums. There is no guarantee you’ll actually get a response to any post you make.

If you want even a basic level of support, you need to pay extra. At the time of this writing, it is a minimum of $100 a month, and all that really gets you is ticket based support with business day hours support without a response guarantee. If you want 24/7 support, it is a minimum of $400 a month. Of course, the pricing information regarding this isn’t on the normal pricing page, but is under the support section.

I found this out at the most inopportune time. My EC2 instance became non-responsive. When I noticed my site had been down half the day, I went looking for contact information to notify Amazon that my instance was having problems. To my surprise, I had no realistic way of notifying them. After posting on the forums my instance was fixed 7 hours later. Posting on the forum worked, but relying on this would be foolish. Their suggested solution to resolve this problem in the future was to place my data on a EBS volume, and to fire up a replacement instance. In reality, the only way to have reliable service on EC2 is to have a minimum of two services running in a HA cluster setup with shared EBS volumes for data. This is expensive for a VPS, and isn’t very user-friendly.

A couple weeks later I upgraded the kernel on the instance to fix the current nasty kernel bugs, and, unfortunately for me, my instance stopped responding again. Normally in this situation, I’d use a console to access the system, and if I couldn’t fix the problem that way, I’d boot into a rescue disk to fix the problem. You can’t do either of these things with EC2. In this situation it wasn’t really needed though. The (read only) console output showed no problems. The VM booted normally. What happened? The same thing as weeks before.

I was sick and tired of Amazon’s sub-par offering, so I decided to look around for other solutions.

Recently I’ve been evaluating OpenStack for a virtualization cluster for the Wikimedia Foundation, and it is looking really promising. Since the solution was looking good, I decided to check out Rackspace’s cloud offering to see how it compared to EC2. I must say that it is a welcome competitor. Here’s why I like them:

1. The images are persistent
2. It is roughly the same cost
3. It has a usable console
4. It has a rescue mode
5. It offers virtual machine snapshots
6. It offers more non-community supported OS versions
7. It has real support built into the base price

Goodbye Amazon, I won’t miss you.