Amazon EC2 Now More Ready for Application Hosting 149
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.
IPv6 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
I might move my website over (Score:0, Interesting)
check out Mosso (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
No (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I have a question: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 or no as well.
Anyone Use 3Tera's AppLogic? (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Slicehost.com (Score:2, Interesting)
Although recently a Debian Developer was critical of slicehost [pusling.com], and seemingly in a valid way.
Personally I host a reasonably high-traffic antispam service [mail-scanning.com] and I think Amazon's offering looks good, but as mentioned a little pricy.
I love the idea of adding extra nodes on-demand, but I think I'm not yet at the level where it would be a worthwhile use of my time or budget.
Re:No persistent storage; not great value (Score:3, Interesting)
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 about those plans and address them so that they are not a problem.
As for the slicehost option, we looked at them. We found that Amazon seemed to provide a much more robust service. Plus, Amazon has a LOT more resources to keep their service robust, as opposed to a startup with one datacenter.
Re:Expensive; Especially to Debug (Score:3, Interesting)
"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 :)
Re:It's too proprietary (Score:3, Interesting)
As just one example, we don't do full backups, but rather have our images install everything on startup (which is rare, and fast anyway), and simply hot-sync our RDBMS while it's running. Simple and fast! Then we wanted to install a blog, so we installed Wordpress. Later we discovered that Wordpress uses our database for posts (so it replicated them just fine), but *also* writes to the filesystem for file uploads. So we needed to install the "Wordpress S3" extension, so file uploads got backed-up to S3 too.
Were we stupid to assume that web apps that use an RDBMS use only the RDBMS? Or to use Wordpress? Or to hotsync only and not do full backups of our image? Maybe all of the above. But it seems about equal to me to say "EC2 is standard Xen" as "Perl is cross-platform": it's certainly possible to use it that way. You can also tie yourself down to a platform really easily, if you don't make portability a priority. We don't think EC2/S3 is going away soon, so we took the easy way.
True, we could just move our image somewhere else. It would probably run, mostly. Things like "back up EC2 to S3" we'd need to spend time changing, because I don't think anybody else in the world uses the same interfaces there. That, I assume, is what the GP was speaking of.
Re:I might move my website over (Score:1, Interesting)
You should have a serious talk with him.
Re:Slicehost.com (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, and OpenBSD on a Mac Mini is really nice.
Re:Bandwidth Limits/Costs? (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, if you prepare for that, the cost differential is likely to grow, as if you have EC2 as a fallback you can afford to get closer to full load and bandwidth usage before you add more physical boxes...
EC2 is just too expensive to be worth it for normal use...
Re:A Few Basic Questions (Score:2, Interesting)
Say you're an indie 3D animated movie creator. You've been doing your modeling, render some scenes, done some low res proofs, some nice single frames.
But now you want to render the entire movie, in HD. But you're not PIXAR.
So you set up a VM to be a rendering slave, log in to amazon, "hi, I'd like 1000 machines please". Load everything up, render your movie, and you're done.
Amazon is charging by CPU (and bandwidth). The rendering time for a movie is fixed, it's going to take X CPU Hours to render the movie, let's say 24000 hours. (Why yes, I am pulling these numbers out of thin air.) So, you can either spend 3 years rendering that on a single machine, or shop it out to Amazon and have it rendered in a day.
That's a great example of the kinds of tasks the Amazon cloud can do readily. Now you can gene sequence at home without building out the 2 car garage in to a monster data center.
It's also great if you, say, want to demo a web site for a week, but don't have a spare server you can use.
Stuff like that.
While the meme of the article it something permanently hosted on Amazon, it's real niche is spontaneous, short term, computing needs. You can get a VM at Amazon faster (perhaps cheaper) than your internal IT department.