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Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances

peteris.rocks

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Re: Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances

#31

Post by kuschku »

Johnny555 wrote: post #30
kuschku wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking is not a solution. This is a question of trust. I have to trust that DO will keep my data safe, that, if the US government would be after my data, DO would prevent them from accessing it. I have to trust that DO won’t access my data. How am I supposed to trust my, and my user’s personally identifying data, to a company that just like that revokes credit, without warning, and says "well, if you ask nicely, you…

Billing practices and data privacy seem like completely different subjects and I'd be surprised if there's much correlation between the two.

Why? You’d trust all your private data, and your customers data, to a company that just tried to scam you out of money if you hadn’t been careful? (Maybe "scam" is a strong word, but the result is the same – changing the ToS to revoke credit with only a weeks warning certainly is shady)

I’m sorry, but I can’t trust such a company.

Re: Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances

#32

Post by asddddd »

kuschku wrote: post #18
dewey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They expired some credits that I haven't used but after asking they just restored them and I could use them. Asking helps.

Asking is not a solution. This is a question of trust. I have to trust that DO will keep my data safe, that, if the US government would be after my data, DO would prevent them from accessing it. I have to trust that DO won’t access my data. How am I supposed to trust my, and my user’s personally identifying data, to a company that just like that revokes credit, without warning, and says "well, if you ask nicely, you…

> ...if the US government would be after my data, DO would prevent them from accessing it.

This is completely unrealistic. If the [local jurisdiction government] is after your data, they'll have your host, ISP, and anyone else give it to them.

(Inexplicable downtime = your server being imaged.)

Believing anything else, IMO, is purely delusional.

Re: Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances

#33

Post by zzzcpan »

kuschku wrote: post #13
deivid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where? I'm using Digital Ocean and it'd be way more expensive for that kind of configuration.

Here’s a list of providers by cost: https://git.io/vps (PS: Don’t use DigitalOcean, they tend to steal your credit if they feel like it. Lost 100 bucks "promotional credit" that way with only a few days notice)

A lot of people lost not only promotional credits on DO, that you get for free, but referral credits too, that you get by sending traffic, which, you know, actually worth something. So, yeah, trust is something DO doesn't deserve.

Re: Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances

#34

Post by ramanan »

Well, one easy way when using Ubuntu-like distributions is to simply place your `/home` folder on a separate (persistent) EBS volume [1].

With a few on-boot scripts to attach-volumes / start-containers, it should be fairly easy to get going as well.

[1] https://engineering.semantics3.com/the-instance-is-dead-long...

Re: Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances

#35

Post by asddddd »

kuschku wrote: post #13
deivid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where? I'm using Digital Ocean and it'd be way more expensive for that kind of configuration.

Here’s a list of providers by cost: https://git.io/vps (PS: Don’t use DigitalOcean, they tend to steal your credit if they feel like it. Lost 100 bucks "promotional credit" that way with only a few days notice)

For anyone curious: DO issued a ton of promo credit in the past, with an unlimited redemption period, then eventually last year said that credit would expire 12mo after redemption - effective after a month.

They backtracked on that regarding non-promo credit (referrals etc) and gave a 1-year grace period.

FWIW, I've been very happy with DO, had a couple $5 VPSes there for 3-4 years and they've been remarkably reliable. One host migration, one SLA credit and lengthy failure analysis, and a bunch of notifications ahead of time for maintenance. More than I'd expect for most hosts in the price range.

Not the most powerful for your money, of course, but awesome if you need to run some services with a public IP and consistent uptime.

Re: Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances

#36

Post by kuschku »

asddddd wrote: post #32
kuschku wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking is not a solution. This is a question of trust. I have to trust that DO will keep my data safe, that, if the US government would be after my data, DO would prevent them from accessing it. I have to trust that DO won’t access my data. How am I supposed to trust my, and my user’s personally identifying data, to a company that just like that revokes credit, without warning, and says "well, if you ask nicely, you…

> ...if the US government would be after my data, DO would prevent them from accessing it. This is completely unrealistic. If the [local jurisdiction government] is after your data, they'll have your host, ISP, and anyone else give it to them. (Inexplicable downtime = your server being imaged.) Believing anything else, IMO, is purely delusional.

Well, the US isn’t the local jurisdiction.

I’m in Germany, my users are in Germany, and if I host with DO in Frankfurt, I have to trust that my data stays in Frankfurt.

Re: Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances

#37

Post by kuschku »

asddddd wrote: post #35
kuschku wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a list of providers by cost: https://git.io/vps (PS: Don’t use DigitalOcean, they tend to steal your credit if they feel like it. Lost 100 bucks "promotional credit" that way with only a few days notice)

For anyone curious: DO issued a ton of promo credit in the past, with an unlimited redemption period, then eventually last year said that credit would expire 12mo after redemption - effective after a month. They backtracked on that regarding non-promo credit (referrals etc) and gave a 1-year grace period. FWIW, I've been very happy with DO, had a couple $5 VPSes there for 3-4 years and they've been remarkably reliabl…

> effective after a month.

Actually, they only emailed users to warn them about this ca. 10 days before it was revoked.

I had gotten $100 promotional credit from DO with the GitHub student pack, and planned to use it in my second year of university, as I knew we had to do a practical project there where I’d need it. Well, a few weeks before that project was about to start, I got the email from DO telling me they’d invalidate all my credit next week. In the end, I hosted that project with OVH, and spent over 80€ on it.

But that was extremely annoying, and while I originally wanted to also move servers of a few projects I was hosting to DO, after this I decided not to.

Re: Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances

#39

Post by solatic »

OP is offering some very dangerous advice.

Twenty years ago, software was hosted on fragile single-node servers with fragile, physical hard disks. Programmers would read and write files directly from and to the disk, and learn the hard way that this left their systems susceptible to corruption in case things crashed in the middle of a write. So behold! People began to use relational databases which offered ACID guarantees and were designed from the ground up to solve that problem.

Now we have a resource (spot instances) whose unreliability is a featured design constraint and OP's advice is to just mount the block storage over the network and everything will be fine?

Here's hoping OP is taking frequent snapshots of their volumes because it sure sounds like data corruption is practically a statistical guarantee if you take OP's advice without considering exactly how state is being saved on that EBS volume.

Re: Persisting state between AWS EC2 spot instances

#40

Post by asddddd »

kuschku wrote: post #37
asddddd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone curious: DO issued a ton of promo credit in the past, with an unlimited redemption period, then eventually last year said that credit would expire 12mo after redemption - effective after a month. They backtracked on that regarding non-promo credit (referrals etc) and gave a 1-year grace period. FWIW, I've been very happy with DO, had a couple $5 VPSes there for 3-4 years and they've been remarkably reliabl…

> effective after a month. Actually, they only emailed users to warn them about this ca. 10 days before it was revoked. I had gotten $100 promotional credit from DO with the GitHub student pack, and planned to use it in my second year of university, as I knew we had to do a practical project there where I’d need it. Well, a few weeks before that project was about to start, I got the email from DO telling me they’d in…

I said 1 month because the initial email I got was on 3/31/16, stating expiration effective 5/1, then another email retracting the expiration of my referral credits on 4/27.

Also, blog post here https://blog.digitalocean.com/details-on-expiring-digitaloce...

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