On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 8:06 AM, Jordan Schatz <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for the info everyone, I am thinking strongly that we will use > EC2. I am not sure that I understand EC2, it seems a little to good to be > true. If I understand it correctly I don't need to set up a RAID, or > consciously duplicate my data, because the virtualized EBS (elastic block > storage) is already redundant, and I don't need to have a failover > server, since the virtualized EC2 instance will persist even if the > hardware fails.
Unless you are booting the EC2 instance from EBS your instance will not persist in the event of a hardware failure. If the hardware dies, you'll end up starting an instance on a new piece of hardware, that won't have access to your previous instance. Keep in mind that you'll still need to make backups, even with using EBS. It can still fail, though hopefully at a lower rate (that's what they report) than just a single drive. > > Is that your experience? > > Does all the virtualization great high latency? or other performance > problem? Keep in mind that this is still at it's core shared hosting. You have multiple instances using the same hardware. This is not the same as getting a dedicated server from theplanet.com or cari.net layeredtech.com. Now admittedly this is much more advanced shared hosting (using Xen to run instances), but there aren't a lot of details on disk and network I/O, so there's no way to know when you start an instance exactly what kind of performance you'll get. CPU and memory are easier to virtualize and are less likely to be an issue, but I haven't seen any numbers so we don't know if they over subscribe the CPU or not. > > It just sounds to easy... After all that I'm not saying don't use EC2 (or AWS in general), just that it's good to look at what you are actually getting and not getting. If it does a good job of solving your problem then use it, if not go some where else. Another thing to keep in mind with EC2 (and AWS in general) is that for applications that require a lot of bandwidth it's generally cheaper to go some where else. Again that's a general rule and may not apply depending on exactly what your bandwidth demands are. -- Joseph Scott [email protected] http://josephscott.org/ _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
