Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Explain AWS

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 34 posts

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#21

Post by mindhacker »

delano wrote: post #2

Every EC2 instance has about 150GB of transient disk space. It works like a regular disk but once you shutdown the instance (or in the rare event the instance fails) the disk is gone forever. To solve this problem, Amazon provides EBS volumes ("elastic block storage"). These are like raw disks that you can create on the fly. You create one, attach it to your instances, give it a filesystem, and then mount it. You can…

I've used EC2 for running web servers as well as database server with the db servers being replicated to rackspace for backup.

I have always wondered about how EBS as disk will affect database as it is essentially a network drive. Any info on that would be great.

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#22

Post by mindhacker »

mollylynn wrote: post #4

If you haven't done so already, check out RightScale (www.rightscale.com). They offer a dashboard that helps users access AWS.

Create a free RightScale account and check out their shell scripts. One can get good ideas of automation from them.

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#23

Post by psranga »

mindhacker wrote: post #21
delano wrote: post #2

Every EC2 instance has about 150GB of transient disk space. It works like a regular disk but once you shutdown the instance (or in the rare event the instance fails) the disk is gone forever. To solve this problem, Amazon provides EBS volumes ("elastic block storage"). These are like raw disks that you can create on the fly. You create one, attach it to your instances, give it a filesystem, and then mount it. You can…

I've used EC2 for running web servers as well as database server with the db servers being replicated to rackspace for backup. I have always wondered about how EBS as disk will affect database as it is essentially a network drive. Any info on that would be great.

Yes, does anybody have data on latency and throughput of EBS "disks"?

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#24

Post by kubrick »

jawngee wrote: post #9

a. Unless you like throwing money out the window, there is no need to host your stuff on AWS. It's the most expensive of the cloud offerings. Go with Linode or Slicehost. b. You'll have to use EBS if you want persistent disk storage with an AWS instance. Otherwise when you reboot, goodbye to everything on your harddisk. But, seriously, reconsider your aims of putting up a 24/7 web hosted up on EC2. You're wasting mon…

I'd agree, except for all the reasons people gave below. Also, Slicehost is the only other service that provides RAM > 2GB. And EC2 offers more variety of configuration (higher CPU performance versions, larger RAM versions) than anyone else.

I really wish Slicehost or Linode or SoftLayer or someone would do something a little closer to what Amazon's doing, and provide some enterprise-level competition. I have clients who would love to move to Slicehost but probably can't, because of the disk space limit and other similar restrictions.

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#25

Post by jawngee »

delano wrote: post #16
jawngee wrote: post #9

a. Unless you like throwing money out the window, there is no need to host your stuff on AWS. It's the most expensive of the cloud offerings. Go with Linode or Slicehost. b. You'll have to use EBS if you want persistent disk storage with an AWS instance. Otherwise when you reboot, goodbye to everything on your harddisk. But, seriously, reconsider your aims of putting up a 24/7 web hosted up on EC2. You're wasting mon…

You can do things with EC2 you can't do anywhere else. I've helped companies build deployment processes with EC2 that allows them to launch a staging environment with a single command that includes a complete copy of production data. They run their tests, then cut a release and shutdown the staging environment with another single command. That's not possible without EC2 and EBS.

But he's talking about hosting, not staging. And what you are describing is a good use of EC2. Hosting 24/7 is not.

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#26

Post by jawngee »

delano wrote: post #16
jawngee wrote: post #9

a. Unless you like throwing money out the window, there is no need to host your stuff on AWS. It's the most expensive of the cloud offerings. Go with Linode or Slicehost. b. You'll have to use EBS if you want persistent disk storage with an AWS instance. Otherwise when you reboot, goodbye to everything on your harddisk. But, seriously, reconsider your aims of putting up a 24/7 web hosted up on EC2. You're wasting mon…

You can do things with EC2 you can't do anywhere else. I've helped companies build deployment processes with EC2 that allows them to launch a staging environment with a single command that includes a complete copy of production data. They run their tests, then cut a release and shutdown the staging environment with another single command. That's not possible without EC2 and EBS.

Also, you are wrong. You can do that on slicehost with their API as well.

In fact, with the slicehost api, you can take a snapshot of currently running system, and clone a new slice from that snapshot.

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#27

Post by jawngee »

keefe wrote: post #14
jawngee wrote: post #9

a. Unless you like throwing money out the window, there is no need to host your stuff on AWS. It's the most expensive of the cloud offerings. Go with Linode or Slicehost. b. You'll have to use EBS if you want persistent disk storage with an AWS instance. Otherwise when you reboot, goodbye to everything on your harddisk. But, seriously, reconsider your aims of putting up a 24/7 web hosted up on EC2. You're wasting mon…

After a cursory googling, it looks like AWS is still the only one where you can programatically modify the number of nodes in your cluster. If your goal is to launch a public facing site and automatically scale up to some limit as you get users, then AWS is a good choice. With AWS you are buying automated scalability and amazon's reliability (not that rackspace doesn't know what they're doing)

You can do it with Slicehost's API.

http://articles.slicehost.com/assets/2008/10/3/Slicehost_API...

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#28

Post by delano »

jawngee wrote: post #26
delano wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do things with EC2 you can't do anywhere else. I've helped companies build deployment processes with EC2 that allows them to launch a staging environment with a single command that includes a complete copy of production data. They run their tests, then cut a release and shutdown the staging environment with another single command. That's not possible without EC2 and EBS.

Also, you are wrong. You can do that on slicehost with their API as well. In fact, with the slicehost api, you can take a snapshot of currently running system, and clone a new slice from that snapshot.

Can you create, attach, and take snapshots of multiple disks with Slicehost?

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#29

Post by delano »

jawngee wrote: post #25
delano wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do things with EC2 you can't do anywhere else. I've helped companies build deployment processes with EC2 that allows them to launch a staging environment with a single command that includes a complete copy of production data. They run their tests, then cut a release and shutdown the staging environment with another single command. That's not possible without EC2 and EBS.

But he's talking about hosting, not staging. And what you are describing is a good use of EC2. Hosting 24/7 is not.

Staging is one aspect of hosting. I will go even further and say that because a staging environment needs to mimic the production environment as close as possible it should be hosted by the same vendor too.

You're right that if you compare numbers directly, some aspects of EC2 are more expensive than other vendors. My point is that AWS offers greater value by allowing you to do things you can't do anywhere else.

Allocating static IP addresses on the fly for example.

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#30

Post by wiemersl »

delano wrote: post #2

Every EC2 instance has about 150GB of transient disk space. It works like a regular disk but once you shutdown the instance (or in the rare event the instance fails) the disk is gone forever. To solve this problem, Amazon provides EBS volumes ("elastic block storage"). These are like raw disks that you can create on the fly. You create one, attach it to your instances, give it a filesystem, and then mount it. You can…

Have used ec2 and s3 for a while now in a production context. While there may be cheaper services out there, we've appreciated the ability to scale up and down rapidly, build test environments, etc. It really depends on where you are at in the cycle of a project. If you are running MySQL, and want high availability, you likely want replication, which means multiple instances no matter what provider you choose. With replication, the fact that your disk is transient isn't as big of a deal. The way I look at AWS is that it nudges you in the right direction as far as building reliable, scalable systems.

As far as EBS, another thing to think about is instance types. Since EBS is essentially network attached storage (I believe), network IO greatly affects performance. Small instances don't have particularly great io. Thus, I prefer to run off the transient disk right now over EBS. If we went to larger instance types, which have better network io, that might swing the pendulum.

Post reply on HN