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Amazon EC2 Now More Ready for Application Hosting
Posted by
jamie
on Thu Mar 27, 2008 11:44 AM
from the in-my-humble-opinion dept.
from the in-my-humble-opinion dept.
For months now, I've been geeked about Amazon's EC2 as a web hosting service. But until today, in my opinion, it wasn't ready for prime time. Now it is, for two reasons. One, you can get static IPs, so if an outward-facing VM goes down you can quickly start another one and point your site's traffic to it without waiting for DNS propagation. And two, you can now separate your VMs into "physically distinct, independent infrastructure" zones, so you can plan to keep your site up if a tornado takes out one NOC. If I were developing a new website I'd host it there; buying or leasing real hardware for a startup seems silly. If you have questions, or especially if you know something about other companies' virtual hosting options, post comments -- let's compare notes.
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Hardware: Amazon Betas 'Elastic' Grid Computing Service 78 comments
RebornData writes "I receieved an e-mail this morning inviting me to participate in a limited beta of Amazon EC2: the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. It's a grid computing service that allows you to create and upload your own Linux-based machine images and run them in Amazon's system, starting at $.10 per "instance hour" (each machine instance being equivalent to a 1.7GHz Xeon with 1.75GB of RAM, and 160GB disk). You can use their tools to create and start new instances dynamically to meet whatever your particular capacity needs are at any given moment. Fedora Core 3 and 4 are explicitly supported, but any distro based on the 2.6 kernel should work. The service documentation provides more technical details. Unfortunately, it appears that the beta is limited to existing Amazon S3 users, and is already full."
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Amazon EC2 Open To All 64 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Amazon just announced that the beta program for their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service is now open to all developers. They have also added new instance types. It appears that you can now get the equivalent of an 8-core machine. Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?"
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Hardware: Amazon and Hardware As a Service 53 comments
sioux_chance writes to recommend an article up on ReadWriteWeb comparing Amazon's S3 and EC2 services with Google AdSense. (They are not the first to coin the term "HaaS" for hardware as a service.) The analogy is that Google increased the granularity of (the article invents the term "fragmentized") the revenue side of the Web business, whereas Amazon's HaaS does the same for the cost side. A comment to the blog posting points out that NearlyFreeSpeech.net has been selling fine-grained hardware capacity for years, but Amazon does bring a greater scale to the business.
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IPv6 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
What I'm personally waiting for from EC2 is European datacentres, as I have an application that's latency sensitive.
Parent
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IPV6? How about an SLA! (Score:3, Insightful)
"Less unready" is just as accurate, and perhaps more precise.
Without an SLA, EC2 or SimpleDB, or "Head in The Cloud" is an experimental platform.
Re:IPV6? How about an SLA! (Score:5, Insightful)
EC2 is up and stays up. Reliabilty counts for a lot more than legal recourse, in my book. SLAs don't create reliability, they *help* (hopefully) to create legal recourse, which is a very poor substitute.
Parent
It's too proprietary (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're using Amazon for hosting, you can't switch hosting services; their system is too nonstandard. Do you want to be in a position where they can raise prices or cut off your air supply?
Re:It's too proprietary (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As just one example, we don't do full backups, but rather have our ima
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Re:It's too proprietary (Score:4, Informative)
My company uses EC2 (plus a few other amazon services, which I find to be spectacular) for hosting our application. If we wanted to move to another server or company or datacenter, it's just a matter of setting up the new server and repointing the DNS. Also what is nonstandard about their servers? You basically set them up however you want. You want to run linux? cool. FreeBSD? awesome. Basically you can run any *NIX clone you please. Fortunately lots of people provide excellent templates, so rolling your own is not really necessary.
Parent
I have a question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I have a question: (Score:5, Interesting)
Just in case you were serious... :)
Slashdot, and the company that runs it Sourceforge Inc., aren't using Amazon Web Services for anything that I know of. Slashdot runs on real hardware, not VMs, and we're not planning on changing that anytime soon. I don't know anyone using AWS, which is part of why I'm looking for Slashdot reader feedback. My experience with it is limited to starting up some instances and playing around with installing Apache to see how it all works, and I did that on my own nickel. I chatted with someone at Amazon about AWS last year, but I didn't sign an NDA so I learned about today's news through their public mailing list.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:I have a question: (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
No (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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For me, it'd be more about hassle than price. If I'm developing a new service, it starts with just one server and I don't want the hassle of figuring out where the best host is. I want the flexibility to cancel the whole thing with no contract (billed by the hour) and just walk away if it turns out not to be a good idea. I also want the flexibility to scale quickly from 1 machine to 10 and 100 without having to worry about picking out the hardware, billing, power, cooling, network architecture, backup, fixi
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Bandwidth Limits/Costs? (Score:2)
And if I'm competing with Amazon by running a popular streaming radio station (even paying the required royalties, but of course not to Amazon), will they start shutting me down?
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looks pretty reasonable to me, but i dont really have anything to compare it to. no minimum fee. it's completely based on bandwidth, resources, and usage.
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But I can get data transfer (in or out) for $0.05:GB up to 2TB:mo, with root access on an actual dedicated server, not VPS ($0.03:GB for VPS). At a datacenter I've used for a couple years, with good support, >99.
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In fa
NOC (Score:2, Informative)
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Some more about EC2 (Score:5, Informative)
So here's a little about what EC2 actually is, for those of you who don't know. You don't have to reply here, start your own comments ;)
The Elastic Compute Cloud was originally designed as a way to host applications that needed lots of CPUs, and the option to expand by adding more CPUs. It's a hosting service that lets you start up virtual machines to run any software you want: they have a wide variety of pre-packaged open-source operating systems you can pick to start up your VMs with.
Starting up a VM takes just a minute or two, and it's point-and-click thanks to the Firefox extension [amazonwebservices.com]. Each VM comes in one of three sizes [amazon.com]: small (webhead), large (database), and extra large (bigass database). They cost respectively $72, $288, and $576 a month (billed by the hour), plus bandwidth ($0.18/GB out, somewhat cheaper for data going in and there's a price break at 10 TB).
One of the concerns everyone raises with hosting on virtual machines is that if a VM instance goes down, you lose everything on it. It comes with hard drive storage (160 GB on the small size), but if something goes wrong, that data's gone.
I think the rejoinder here is that, on real hardware, if something goes wrong, your data's gone. You never set up an enterprise-level website on the assumption that any particular hardware has to survive. Single points of failure are always a mistake, and backups are always a necessity. When any machine explodes - real or virtual - the question is how fast your system recovers to "working well enough" (seconds, hopefully) and then how long it takes you to get it "back to normal" behind the scenes (hours, hopefully). Those answers shouldn't depend on whether there's a physical drive to yank out of a dead physical machine that may or may not retain valid data.
Which brings up what I think is one of the selling points of EC2: free fast bandwidth to S3 [amazonwebservices.com], Amazon's near-infinite-size, redundantly-replicated data storage platform. That's a nice backup option to have available. That's part of why, if I were starting a new web service, I wouldn't host it on real hardware. I'd like not having to worry about backups, tapes, offsite copies... bleah, let someone else worry about it.
Slashdot hasn't run many stories on EC2 (none that I know of) because until now it's been a niche service. Without a way to guarantee that you can have a static IP, there had been a single point of failure: if your outward-facing VMs all went down, your only recourse was to start up more VMs on new, dynamically-assigned IPs, point your DNS to them, and wait hours for your users' DNS caches to expire. That meant that while it may have been a good service for sites that needed to do massive private computation, it was an unacceptable hosting service.
Now with static IPs, you basically set up your service to have several VMs which provide the outward-facing service (maybe running a webserver, or a reverse proxy for your internal webservers), and you point your public, static IPs at those. If one or more of them goes down, you start up new copies of those VMs and repoint the IPs to them. No DNS changes required.
I know there are other companies offering web hosting through virtual servers. Please share information about them, the more we all know the better.
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There have been a few. [google.com]
Amazon EC2 Open To All [slashdot.org]
Amazon and Hardware As a Service [slashdot.org]
Amazon Betas 'Elastic' Grid Computing Service [slashdot.org]
check out Mosso (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:check out Mosso (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
A Few Basic Questions (Score:5, Interesting)
1. What is a perfect "typical" application for AWS? (And don't answer, "one that needs to scale...". I'm looking for a realworld example.)
2. Anyone here on Slashdot using these services? Nervous about single point of failure? (And I don't mean just technical, but also financial, legal, security, business continuity, etc.)
3. EC2 / S3: is there any value in using just one? I've noticed there are additional services now, too
4. In the days of SOx / PCI / CISP compliance, is it even possible to set up a financial app on AWS?
5. Also, finally, maybe a question to Amazon... why? Someone did the financials recently and it was a fascinating study. The short of it is that at max capacity, the net income from all of AWS for Amazon is so tiny, you have to wonder why they even bothered... [need citation]
A classic case of wanting to like the technology, but not really sure how to use it. Thanks.
Re:A Few Basic Questions (Score:4, Informative)
2) Yes, very nervous. Especially with the privacy laws in the States. I'm Canadian, and I would be talking to lawyers about data storage issues before having sending customers' data down South.
3) EC2 is useless without S3, since your images are stored on S3. S3 is useful without EC2, as you can use it for static storage and BitTorrent hosting.
4) See my response to #2.
5) I don't work for Amazon.
Parent
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If that's the case, what happens when Christmas rolls around?
Slicehost.com (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been with them for a few months, and their interface's ease of use, and the level of support they provide are just what I was looking for.
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No persistent storage; not great value (Score:5, Informative)
And it's still not a great value. It seems cheap. $72/mo for a 1.7GB RAM server. Well, look at Slicehost and you can get a 2GB RAM Xen instance (same virtualization software as EC2) for $140 WITH persistent storage and 800GB of bandwidth. That doesn't sound like a great deal UNTIL you calculate what EC2 bandwidth costs. 800GB would cost you $144 at $0.18 per GB bringing the total cost to $216 ($76 more than Slicehost). That 18 cents doesn't sound like much, but it adds up. The same situation happens with Joyent. For $250 you get a 2GB RAM server from them (running under Solaris' Zones) with 10TB of bandwidth. That would cost you $1,872 with EC2. Even if you assume that you'll only use 10% of what Joyent is giving you, EC2 still comes in at a cost of $252 - and without persistent storage!
EC2 really got the ball rolling, but it just isn't such a leader. Other operations have critical features (persistent storage) that EC2 is lacking along with pricing that just isn't more expensive. I want to like EC2, but their competitors are simply better.
Re:No persistent storage; not great value (Score:5, Informative)
You get database backup by replicating to another VM, presumably one in a different "zone" for physical separation. Then that backup VM every n hours stops its replication, dumps to S3, and starts replication back up (exactly like a physical machine would stop, dump to tape or to a remote disk, and restart).
Database high-availability is similar. In the extreme case, you replicate your live master to the master database in another zone that entirely duplicates your live zone's setup (same number of webheads, same databases in same replication configuration, etc)... then if the live zone falls into the ocean you point your IPs to the webheads in the HA zone and resume activity within seconds, having lost only a fraction of a second of data stream.
Having dealt with Slashdot's webheads and databases losing disk, and in some cases having to be entirely replaced, I don't see how persistent storage is a big selling point. I mean it's nice I guess, but not something that I'd sacrifice any functionality for. Applications have to be designed to run on unreliable hardware.
Parent
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I haven't used it because of the lack of a static IP. Now, it's a viable solution for the real world.
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If you are running a database backed application on EC2 without a master/slave setup, and your master goes down, to me, that seems like a failure to plan for the worst on your end. It's really not an argument that even though you DO have persistent storage, your data is safe on that server. Your data is never safe. Hence, a backup/replication plan is ALWAYS needed. Services like EC2 force you to think abou
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S3 has been working well for us. While the semantics are different than typical storage, I would argue that they are far from useless. Since files on S3 can be made publicly accessible via a web address, we use S3 to host our assets for our website (css, javascript, images), as well as db backups and other backups.
We have not had to design our app for EC2. We do make use of S3 for storing user data, so we have S3 libraries in our
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The Amazon machines offer storage that persists for the life of the virtual instance. That's until you kill the instance or until the hardware fails. (It does persist through reboots and OS crashes.) And unless Slicehost is running some crazy magic beyond the RAID-10 setup they mention, a hardware failure could still wipe out your data, and will certainly cause downtime during which you will have an opportunity to wonder when and whether y
No virtual ip or failover (Score:2, Interesting)
However, another issue i had was to send traffic between 2 EC2 nodes. They don't mention (maybe i missed) nor guaranty the bandwidth between the nodes in the same availability zone. This is crucial if you are trying to run a very fast performance tests between the 2 nodes and you need minimum delays. I am not sure if the bandwidth between the EC2 nodes is caped
Anyone Use 3Tera's AppLogic? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Our experience using EC2 + Rightscale (Score:5, Interesting)
First off, Amazon has an excellent product. It is essentially Hardware As A Service, and the tools they provide abstract it as such.
The most common argument against using EC2 for hosting is that if your server goes down, you will lose any data created since the last time you saved a snapshot. While this is true, it forces you to bring a backup + recovery plan to the front of the table. Provided you have a backup + recovery plan in place, you no longer have to worry about fixing a server ever again. If something goes wrong with one of our application servers, I would simply fire up a new instance, link it in with DNS, and terminate the old server. With rightscale, this is all pushbutton.
Consider that scenario with running your own colo server. You could potentially spend hours diagnosing + fixing an issue with a server before you could bring it back up. Ok fine, the way to mitigate that is to have a hot backup running. But now we're talking about a ton of cash to support 2 servers on a month-to-month basis. We have found that amazon's costs to run EC2 instances are very competitive for the specs.
Note: I'm not a shill for either rightscale or amazon, I just find that these 2 companies are the forefront of where hosting is going, and their products are awesome. It's all about virtualization!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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"Software failure" in that case refers to a failure of Amazon's Xen software that runs your virtual machine.
Amazon doesn't know or care whether your software is "production quality code" or not. You pay $0.10/hr whether your code is debugged or not :)