Amazon EC2 development is an integral part of its web services arsenal. There are many other services for storage and payments. EC2 is an acronym of “elastic compute cloud.” It is a server which helps one to easily run and manage many instances and can offer a scalable platform. One can even outsource resource-intensive tasks and use it as a server farm.
There are three different sizes which are available and can prove to be more powerful than any other server. Unless there is video processing involved, the default small instance has the capacity of 1.7GB of RAM which works well with most uses. One can even get a server farm with 15GB of RAM if required too.
EC2 has been around and its major problems have been related to data persistence on instances. One can has to carefully build applications around the EC2 architecture for the app to work flawlessly. A crashed instance can be run again and one might lose data since a new IP is allotted which might increase DNS issues. The latest elastic IP feature though lets the user to assign a static IP address to the instances as required.
Many considerations need to be made for solving the data persistence issue. There are many services which have stable systems on top of EC2 like WeoCeo, Scalr and RightScale.
Now let us take a look at Rackspace. Although both services are excellent and the tests are just results that one needs. Some companies might have other needs and the test might prove otherwise too.
Let us compare both Amazon EC2 and Rackspace on different terms
In terms of price, it is similar for both although it is after some time that one realizes that the pricing bit is not all similar as it looks. Rackspace users have multiple options for payment starting 1.5 cents an hour while Amazon EC2 does not offer many options for machine sizes. There are Amazon instances which are extremely big or too small while there is a middle option for everything in Rackspace.
A 100 Gb disk in Amazon EC2 (EBS volume) with backup with Amazon charges you for the complete 100 Gb even though the user might be using only 50 Gb. Rackspace takes into account space that is occupied and also does not charge a thing from its customers for i/o operations.
Performance factor is never much of an issue with cloud computing services since resources can be scaled up and down. But performance on the basis of costing is a different issue. When similar performance was achieved in both Amazon Web Services and Rackspace instances, anybody would realize that users will be saving 30% of their money with Rackspace.
Amazon EC2 is not at all simple in any way since it offers many different possibilities for creating instances Though, once the user gets the hang of it, it is easy. It takes ample amount of time to get everything in place which is not what everybody wants.Rackspace on the other hand is extremely easy to learn and one can get it up and running within hours.
The Cloud watch service in Amazon is extremely powerful and efficient. But in Rackspace, the monitoring tool is extremely limited. Also, Amazon offers more broad computing services than Rackspace. Additionally, EC2 works without interruptions most of the time, but with Rackspace, the service is astoundingly good. As per some analysts Rackspace holds an edge over Amazon. But not everyone agrees to it though.
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