So are you using your EC2 instances 24/7? Do you use on-demand instances or 
reserved ones? EC2 seems ridiculously cheap as long as you start instances only 
when you need them, but for permanent usage I'm not sure yet.

- Marius

On 03.08.2010, at 14:28, Simon wrote:

> we run a db.m1.large instance and our db is around 20GB. previously it ran on 
> an intel xserve with 8GB of Ram. performance wise db.m1.large is around where 
> we were before, but we've not been scientific about this because we didn't 
> have any performance issues before, and we don't have any now. we didn't move 
> to RDS for performance.
> 
> however, when staging the move we initially ran a db.m1.small instance and 
> that was nowhere near powerful enough. when we boot copies of production for 
> testing purposes we use db.m1.small, but we wouldn't use that in production.
> 
> the real beauty of RDS with regard to performance is that is its literally a 
> couple of clicks to upgrade. how long do you think it will take you to 
> transition your DB to that a linux raid server ? we could double our compute 
> power and ram in literally 3 clicks and a couple of minutes - and because we 
> run with multi-avail zone it would automatically fail over to the slave 
> whilst the upgrade took place.
> 
> we don't use ssl. traffic is limited to our ec instances, and yes sensitive 
> data is encrypted in the db anyway. we've just flown through PCIDSS 
> compliance without a glitch.
> 
> regarding multi-avail: my understanding is that they have made limited 
> modifications to the 5.1 code base to support running mysql on a big scale in 
> the cloud. i don't know if that includes fundamental changes to the 
> master/slave mechanics, but the way multi-avail works "feels" like it's just 
> plain old replication, but wrapped in some fancy automation.
> 
> yeah, the docs do mention latency, but we've not noticed anything at all.
> 
> the biggest mistake we made was attempting to run apps outside ec2 pointing 
> at RDS. the latency in that set-up killed our apps. ymmv.
> 
> simon
> 
> 
> 
> On 2 August 2010 21:02, Kieran Kelleher <kieran_li...@mac.com> wrote:
> Sounds great Simon.
> 
> I have a database of about 35GB of data running on an 8GB PowerPC G5 today in 
> one of my active projects and we have preliminary plans under way to upgrade 
> our DB server to a 32GB Linux  RAID unit. What is the biggest RDS memory size 
> instance that you have used, and what is the perception of performance gains, 
> if any, over traditional self or colo hosting?
> 
> I notice they support SSL connections also to MySQL. Do you use SSL between 
> the EC2 app instance and the RDS instance - or is that overkill considering 
> that I have sensitive data (credit card numbers, etc) encrypted in the 
> database fields anyway? If you do use SSL connections between app and db, 
> have you noticed much latency?
> 
> You said you have availed of the different zone replication/failover feature 
> - from reading the FAQs, it appears that this is different to traditional 
> master-slave replication - are they executing the SQL in parallel on both the 
> master and failover RDS instances to give true mirroring, or am I reading 
> this wrong? Have you noticed latency impact due to this configuration (the 
> online info suggests that there is some latency)?
> 
> Regards, Kieran
> 
> On Aug 2, 2010, at 1:38 PM, Simon wrote:
> 
>> How does session management work with the elastic load balancer? For example 
>> if you have 3 independent EC2 instances all running the same app?
>> 
>> if you are not using https then amazon provide a couple of cookie-based 
>> mechanisms for session stickiness. if you are using https then you can use 
>> the elb to send initial requests to one of your instances, then the user 
>> communicates with that specific instance directly. there is no 
>> ssl-termination available with elb, but the amazon lists suggest this is 
>> coming. once they have this ssl load balancing will be a lot more elegant.
>>  
>> Also, do you completely trust RDS to make sure your data is never lost? Is 
>> there any need for you to have a physical server replicating from RDS? Is 
>> there any risk that one day, amazon loses your database and says "Sorry, but 
>> we assume you have your own backup"?
>> 
>> in short, yes, i completely trust it. we've been running it in production 
>> for 9 months now without a single glitch. we use their multi-avail support 
>> and we've done test failovers which happen flawlessly in minutes. how long 
>> would it take you to (a) make a decision to fail over your master to a slave 
>> and (b) physically carry out the failover and (c) physically restore the 
>> master once things are sorted out ? the automation here alone makes it a 
>> much more powerful solution than running it ourselves.
>> 
>> and how often do you test restoring from your backups ? officially we used 
>> to do it once a month, but it was always a real drag... now we routinely 
>> restore databases - sometimes several times a day - and use them to test 
>> code against because it's 2 clicks, make a cup of tea, and you've got a 
>> fully functioning snapshot of production from 5 minutes ago.
>> 
>> do we ever take "normal" backups ? yes, but very very rarely, and not for 
>> date protection - we do them purely to get a fresher copy on our laptops for 
>> offline use.
>> 
>> Simon
>> 
>>  
>> 
>> -Kieran
>> 
>> On Jul 27, 2010, at 1:16 PM, Simon wrote:
>> 
>>> doing what you've done means you're managing mysql, looking after it, 
>>> making sure it doesn't fall over, doing backups, managing replication etc. 
>>> rds does all of that for you. it also makes changing the config of your 
>>> database server a breeze: need more disk space ? couple of clicks. need 
>>> more ram ? couple of clicks. need more compute power behind it ? couple of 
>>> clicks. need automatic fail-over to a different availability zone ? couple 
>>> of clicks.
>>> 
>>> re web server resources, remember it's just a normal wo deployment running 
>>> in the cloud, so you can do whatever you do now.
>>> 
>>> we don't separate the web and app tier - all our ec2 instances run monitor, 
>>> wotaskd and apache, and are effectively independent of each other, and we 
>>> use an elastic load balancer up front.
>>> 
>>> simon
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 27 July 2010 17:40, James Cicenia <ja...@jimijon.com> wrote:
>>> So the base image is the actual OS? So you are managing it as the admin?
>>> 
>>> I decided to try WOlastic. I configured the instances, setup up mysql with 
>>> my users and sync'd the database from existing production to amazon.
>>> So you are suggesting RDS vs. what I just did? What are the benefits of 
>>> RDS? Amazon backs up the mysql I created.
>>> 
>>> Now I am a bit stumped on WebServerResources. How are you handling that?
>>> 
>>> Well, if this works well, I can my webobject apps over and then just sell 
>>> my server and drop the colo.
>>> 
>>> - James
>>> 
>>> On Jul 27, 2010, at 11:28 AM, Simon wrote:
>>> 
>>>> rolling your own is surprisingly easy if you start with a base image. we 
>>>> started out with a vanilla centos image from rightscale, and have built it 
>>>> up into what we needed from there. you can then create an ebs-backed ami 
>>>> in a couple of clicks.
>>>> 
>>>> re pricing, it all depends on what you need. our financial models tell us 
>>>> for our deployment is excellent value for money, and we can scale well 
>>>> beyond our current needs and it remains as such. use the cost aws 
>>>> calculator to figure out your own costs, and remember to factor in staff 
>>>> costs in your decision making process. those DBA's are darn expensive 
>>>> compared to RDS :-)
>>>> 
>>>> http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
>>>> 
>>>> the only performance issue we found is that it is basically impossible to 
>>>> host your DB outside of amazon due to latency. but you don't have to use 
>>>> RDS - if you like sticking needles in your eyes you can just run and look 
>>>> after your own mysql / postgre / mssql / whatever on an ec2 instance.
>>>> 
>>>> the general performance of our apps has also vastly improved. a mixture of 
>>>> using more computing power and amazon having much faster internet transit 
>>>> than we were paying for in our previous co-lo.
>>>> 
>>>> alongside production we also run our staging servers and our hudson build 
>>>> server on ec2. in productivity terms running hudson there was a huge leap 
>>>> forward: previously a new build would take around 30 minutes to upload to 
>>>> staging / production. now it takes 19 seconds flat :-)
>>>> 
>>>> we're shortly going to move our subversion repository to ec2 as well.
>>>> 
>>>> Simon
>>>> 
>>>> On 27 July 2010 15:13, James Cicenia <ja...@jimijon.com> wrote:
>>>> This is very cool. 
>>>> 
>>>> I need to move one of my servers, or, use the cloud approach for its 
>>>> WOApps. I see you rolled your own but wolastic seems like it is for a mere 
>>>> mortal.
>>>> 
>>>> Anyone use wolastic? What is the pricing your are seeing? Issues? 
>>>> Performances? Etc.
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks.
>>>> James Cicenia
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Jul 26, 2010, at 3:55 PM, Simon wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> we don't use the wolastic images (we have our own) but we do deploy 
>>>>> entirely on the amazon ec2 cloud now. ec2 instances running standard 
>>>>> javamonitor / wotaskd, amazon RDS for database server, s3 for file 
>>>>> storage etc. scalability on demand, load balancing, redundancy across 
>>>>> multiple availability zones. it's the best thing since sliced bread...
>>>>> 
>>>>> our staging servers (also on ec2) run wonders javamonitor / wotasd and 
>>>>> hence we'll probably upgrade our production servers to those soon.
>>>>> 
>>>>> simon
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 26 July 2010 21:36, Ramsey Gurley <ram...@xeotech.com> wrote:
>>>>> I haven't tried it yet, but WOlastic looks like a *really* cool 
>>>>> deployment solution for WO.
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://wolastic.com/
>>>>> 
>>>>> Ramsey
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Jul 26, 2010, at 4:27 PM, Ken Anderson wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Thanks for the thoughts guys!
>>>>> 
>>>>> Ken
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Jul 26, 2010, at 1:42 PM, Pascal Robert wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Le 2010-07-26 à 12:55, Chuck Hill a écrit :
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Jul 26, 2010, at 9:44 AM, Ken Anderson wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> I've been asked to comment on the best way to deploy WebObjects today 
>>>>> without any "imposed" restrictions.  I haven't done any new deployments 
>>>>> in a long while, so I'm likely not up to date on the last.  What are 
>>>>> people using today, and why do they think it's the best?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Thanks much!
>>>>> Ken
>>>>> 
>>>>> Lacking imposed restrictions (e.g. must run in J2EE container), 
>>>>> traditional WO deployment through Apache with mod_webobjects is probably 
>>>>> the way to go.  Anjo was working on mod_proxy deployment, but I don't 
>>>>> recall how far he got or if he has this in production.  It looked 
>>>>> promising.  There is also a Fast CGI adaptor and Ravi is working on 
>>>>> something for WOWODC.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I'm adding some mods in JavaMonitor too (for WOWODC) and Andrew Lindesay 
>>>>> also have stuff in LEWOStuff to use mod_proxy_ajp.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> ----
>>>>> Pascal Robert
>>>>> prob...@macti.ca
>>>>> 
>>>>> AIM: MacTICanada
>>>>> Twitter : MacTICanada
>>>>> LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/macti
>>>>> WO Community profile : http://wocommunity.org/page/member?name=probert
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
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