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Ask HN: Explain AWS

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Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#11

Post by iamelgringo »

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…

It is one of the cheapest ways to get a Windows 2003 server slice, if that's your cup of tea, however.

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#12

Post by delano »

iamelgringo wrote: post #10
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 found it easier to think of an EC2 image's 150GB of 'disk' as RAM, and Elastic Block as an actual hard drive. EC2's disk is there when it's powered on, but when you turn it off, all data disappears. Elastic block is really EC2's hard drive. Two issues that burned me a couple of months ago with EC2 and Elastic Block: I built my server and got it running just right. I then wanted to back it up, so I bundled it (sa…

Ya, getting burned by EC2 is a rite of passage. I learned my lesson with Amazon's API tools. Dealing with IDs is cumbersome and dangerous when it comes to production instances. Automation is a necessity.

How are you running your automated backups? Have you automated deployment too?

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#13

Post by latortuga »

keefe wrote: post #5

Each EC2 instance is a virtual, private server which looks just like any other linux box. However, files on disk are part of shared drives and are not guaranteed to persist. You have three choices : attach and pay for an elastic block store that IS persistent, make periodic backups to S3 or forgo the use of the disk altogether and use SimpleDB instead of mySQL. I'd recommend using an elastic block store.

I'll back this up with the addendum that SimpleDB has useful applications where using it might be a better choice than MySQL (e.g. a service that gets lots of reads but real-time updates isn't necessarily mission critical)

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#14

Post by keefe »

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)

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#16

Post by delano »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#17

Post by reconbot »

gsmaverick wrote: post #7
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…

Thanks for your reply. I now understand how it all works.

That's a dangerous statement ;-)

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#18

Post by jrockway »

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…

Depends on how much disk space you need. With Amazon, the space is virtually limitless, and transfers to and from S3 are free. With Slicehost and Linode, you get really tiny disks, and you have to pay for bandwidth to S3 if you need more.

It's also hard to dynamically scale with Slicehost or Linode. You can't have a script bring an instance up for an hour and then shut it down when the load drops off. (Actually, you probably can, but that's not what it's designed for.)

Obviously EC2 is not for everyone, but it is good if you need its features.

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#19

Post by kubrick »

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…

1- thx for the ruby dsl link -- I hadn't heard of it, and I can't understand why

2- the problem with using EBS comes when you have a larger DB, like, oh, 80GB or so. It takes no less than 6-8 hours to produce a snapshot of that -- I just tried it. You can do a simple rsync to another instance in like 2-3 hours. I want to like EBS but it seems ... slow.

Re: Ask HN: Explain AWS

#20

Post by enjo »

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…

Amazon provides a host of support services (Cloudfront CDN anyone??) that are trivial to manage from an existing EBS volume. The extra services that Amazon offers really make the process of going from zero to scale much simpler (albeit not 'easy') than any other host or collection of tools that I've used.

That makes it worth the slightly higher costs for me.

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