That's not my only reason for preferring EC2 for lots of short-lived servers. I left out some anecdotes.
Four months ago, one of my coworkers booted 12 cloud servers in DFW. I later discovered that 3 of them were on the same physical hardware. Two months ago, about 55 of 60 servers actually came up in ORD. Others were inaccesible or hung. Not even hard reboots helped. We had to kill them and start new ones.
I've had a total of 2 EC2 instances die on me. I admit my usage of the two providers is quite different. The stuff on EC2 is shorter-lived. But I'm pretty sure that high turnover on other providers would cause a lot more grief.
I've seen literally dozens of unresponsive and defective EC2 instances over the last year. This was spawning 100s of medium and large instances per day, with an average instance lifetime of around 3 hours.
From what I've read during my usage of AWS over the last couple of years, this is more the norm than the exception.
I think we agree then. Dozens out of 36,000+ instances is a very low failure rate. I haven't had nearly that volume so I've only experienced 2 failures on EC2.
That's not my only reason for preferring EC2 for lots of short-lived servers. I left out some anecdotes.
Four months ago, one of my coworkers booted 12 cloud servers in DFW. I later discovered that 3 of them were on the same physical hardware. Two months ago, about 55 of 60 servers actually came up in ORD. Others were inaccesible or hung. Not even hard reboots helped. We had to kill them and start new ones.
I've had a total of 2 EC2 instances die on me. I admit my usage of the two providers is quite different. The stuff on EC2 is shorter-lived. But I'm pretty sure that high turnover on other providers would cause a lot more grief.