Analysis of GoGrid Cloud Usage
November 12th, 2009 | Published in Analysis | 5 Comments
In previous posts, we’ve gone to great lengths to make educated guesses regarding Amazon EC2 usage. Amazon, however, are not alone in the cloud space. It makes sense that we do the same for other providers to get an idea of their comparative levels of usage.
In today’s post, we’ll be discussing such an analysis of GoGrid.
GoGrid’s technology seems to make the process almost trivial – the server ID that is assigned to each and every server provisioned appears to be a straightforward serial number. Hence, this time we need not find patterns or XOR bytes, and can instead get down to business. As always, I will warn that the numbers are circumstantial and only GoGrid knows if they are the real thing.
In total, during a time span of just over 13 days this research witnessed 2413 servers provisioned on GoGrid. On average, that comes to approximately 181 servers launched per day.
How does this compare to Amazon EC2? We calculated 50,000 servers/day for EC2, so the difference is significant. To put it another way – by this count, if GoGrid was the size of the Texas then EC2 would be the Pacific Ocean. Let’s try to dig a little deeper though: this measurement is more a reflection of a provider’s level of elasticity than of its absolute size. With a thriving ecosystem of tools and services such as Elastic Load Balancing and Elastic MapReduce it’s not surprising to find the use of EC2 servers is more dynamic.
On a personal note, I must say I was put off by the time it takes to launch a server on GoGrid (sometimes up to 8 minutes) as compared to what I was used to from EC2. For me, that means that if I need a quick server just to run something for a minute or two there would be no question.
Coming up next time – a similar analysis of Rackspace Cloud Servers.
November 12th, 2009 at 5:43 pm (#)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by garnaat and Guy Rosen, James Watters. James Watters said: RT @guyro: Analysis of @gogrid cloud usage – 181 servers launched per day on average: http://bit.ly/WjYrI [...]
November 12th, 2009 at 6:04 pm (#)
Just a quick note to readers of this. While Guy’s analysis is helpful, it often does not accurately reflect GoGrid numbers. The very nature of Cloud Computing is that it is dynamic with VMs being deployed and removed regularly. Also, since we offer Hybrid Hosting (connecting Cloud front-end infrastructures with back-end dedicated servers), there may be more infrastructure “behind” the cloud.
While I can’t disclose exact numbers due to some clients’ privacy concerns, our internal numbers are higher and continue to grow.
AWS does provide many features, but they are self-service and up to you to join together for full functionality. We offer real f5 Load Balancers (no Elastic LBs), static contiguous blocks of public IP addresses, persistent storage on VMs, Windows Server 2003 & 2008, free 24×7 support, and competitive volume discounts (recently revised)…just a few quick differentiators.
Lastly, we continue to improve launch times of VMs, especially sequential instantiations of VMs. The 8 minute number is not average.
Thanks Guy for continuing to provide insight into our Cloud and other Clouds out there. I look forward to continuing to work with you on fine-tuning your analysis.
-Michael Sheehan
Technology Evangelist for GoGrid
November 12th, 2009 at 8:14 pm (#)
@Michael, thanks for taking the time to respond directly.
Regarding the VM launch times: I concede that 8 minutes is not average. The average is 6 minutes (this from a calculation I just ran on 20 launches – GoGrid’s job history makes this easy to do! (-: ). The fastest time was 4 minutes and the longest 9 minutes.
We have grown accustomed to expecting 4 minutes to be the worst case – not the best. This is definitely something GoGrid should be working on.
November 17th, 2009 at 1:55 pm (#)
Best topics in cloud_computing for 2009-11-12…
Best topics in cloud_computing for 2009-11-12…
November 18th, 2009 at 6:54 am (#)
Best topics in cloud_computing for 2009-11-13…
Best topics in cloud_computing for 2009-11-13…