On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 9:13 AM, Petr Bena <benapetr(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As to why:
AWS is more flexible and more reliable than wikimedia-labs, other than
that it's basically the same. If they really need to use AWS it's
probably because they don't like the restrictions that come with
wikimedia labs (stuff must be open source, comply with policies, only
ubuntu or debian, no proprietary software, hard-to-get public IP, long
waiting time for stuff that you can't do yourself (request new
project), no IPv6 and many others)
Assuming you don't use NFS, Labs is likely as reliable or possibly more
reliable than EC2, since effort is put into saving instances when hardware
is having issues (which AWS does not do). Project creation is usually
pretty fast in Labs. When you create a new account in AWS, you have to get
approved for most of the features before you can use them, so it's not
quite as quick as you're making out. Getting public IPs in Labs is
restricted, but it's also the most restricted thing in AWS too. For the
most part it's unnecessary to get/use public IPs. In AWS basically
everything goes in through ELBs and in Labs there's an ELB equivalent.
As for the rest of the restrictions, yep. Those totally make sense and fit
with the intent of Labs.
I think some of the benefits of Labs are being ignored here. You may be
limited to ubuntu/debian, but you also create an instance that's
pre-configured, that you (and any other project member) can immediately SSH
into. DNS is handled for you, load balancers are easy to use, cross-project
access is way easier (no need to manage IAM and VPCs), and networking is
pre-configured (which is actually non-trivial in AWS). Most importantly
it's free for end-users.
- Ryan
