Migrating from AWS to AWS

#1

Post by mikeyk » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 5:06 PM UTC

Migrating from AWS to AWS
instagram-engineering.tumblr.com

Re: Migrating from AWS to AWS

#2

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 6:46 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Migrating from AWS to AWS

#3

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 6:58 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #2

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Migrating from AWS to AWS

#4

Post by Someone1234 » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 6:59 PM UTC

I'm used to AWS pricing but I'm still a little fuzzy on how AWS VPC pricing works.

It is $0.05 per VPN Connection-hour. But in this context what is a "VPN connection?" Do you literally just set up your cloud for "free" (aside from paying for instances, etc) and then only pay $0.05 for every hour you spend connected to the private cloud externally?

Does the VPC have any external visibility aside from the VPN connections? And if it does, what is stopping you just setting up your own VPN server and bypassing the $0.05/hour rate?

Re: Migrating from AWS to AWS

#5

Post by ceejayoz » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 7:01 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #4

I'm used to AWS pricing but I'm still a little fuzzy on how AWS VPC pricing works. It is $0.05 per VPN Connection-hour. But in this context what is a "VPN connection?" Do you literally just set up your cloud for "free" (aside from paying for instances, etc) and then only pay $0.05 for every hour you spend connected to the private cloud externally? Does the VPC have any external visibility aside from the VPN connectio…

VPC is free (and actually, new AWS accounts launch instances by default into a default VPC Amazon sets up for you).

The $0.05 per VPN Connection-hour is only if you want to connect your own network to your VPC. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_VP...

> Does the VPC have any external visibility aside from the VPN connections? And if it does, what is stopping you just setting up your own VPN server and bypassing the $0.05/hour rate?

Some do that, but the ~$30/month you're saving is likely eaten up by the cost of setting up and managing it and the software VPN instance you have to run.

Re: Migrating from AWS to AWS

#6

Post by soccerdave » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 7:02 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #4

I'm used to AWS pricing but I'm still a little fuzzy on how AWS VPC pricing works. It is $0.05 per VPN Connection-hour. But in this context what is a "VPN connection?" Do you literally just set up your cloud for "free" (aside from paying for instances, etc) and then only pay $0.05 for every hour you spend connected to the private cloud externally? Does the VPC have any external visibility aside from the VPN connectio…

VPC instance pricing is the same as EC2 pricing. The VPN pricing is if you want to setup a VPN between your office (or some other location) and your VPC.

Re: Migrating from AWS to AWS

#7

Post by pbadger0 » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 7:38 PM UTC

I wish Instagram engineering posts were all just collections of pictures with comments, with a different Instagram filter for each picture.

Re: Migrating from AWS to AWS

#8

Post by cosmeen » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 8:19 PM UTC

pbadger0 wrote: post #7

I wish Instagram engineering posts were all just collections of pictures with comments, with a different Instagram filter for each picture.

And a bunch of #hashtags

Re: Migrating from AWS to AWS

#9

Post by legohead » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 8:42 PM UTC

We just migrated over to VPC as well, and came across a really weird "bug".

We auto-scale EC2, and randomly when auto-scaling, the new server couldn't connect to memcache (ElastiCache). Note that when you migrate over to VPC you have to migrate everything -- launch new ElastiCache servers in VPC, EC2 servers, RDS servers, etc.

Back to the bug.. I'd ssh into the EC2 server, and when I telnetted to memcache, it wouldn't connect. I terminated the EC2 server, and a new server comes up and can connect fine. I made a forum post in AWS forums and got zero responses. We then bought into AWS support and I submitted a ticket.

The problem: I launched my ElastiCache servers in the same subnet as my EC2 servers. Apparently the ElastiCache servers by default remembers servers in the same subnet by Mac address. Since we were cycling EC2 servers, eventually we'd get one with the same Mac address but new internal IP address, and I'm no networking guy but apparently this caused a routing problem.

Solution: create a new subnet and launch all the ElastiCache servers in that subnet. I did that, and it fixed the problem. The AWS support rep said if the ElastiCache servers are launched in their own subnet it will force them to go by IP instead of Mac address.

Anyway, hope this helps someone out ;)

Re: Migrating from AWS to AWS

#10

Post by roncohen » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 9:16 PM UTC

We also migrated a while back (opbeat.com). While we run a smaller setup, I imagine that might be the case for most readers. We run a pretty standard setup with ELB, Postgres (master/replica), webservers and job processing servers.

This recipe details what we did (as i recall it):

  1) Prerequisites: Running at least two of everything in
     separate AZs and expertise (or courage) to fail over
     to a replica DB.
  2) Boot up instances of everything in the VPC
  3) Set up a new ELB inside the VPC, add the web servers inside to the ELB
  4) Make sure your instances inside the VPC can talk to
     which ever service they need outside (replica database
     and web servers needs to reach master outside +
     memcached). Use `telnet` to make absolutely sure :)
  5) Make sure web and job servers can reach the
     replica db and memcached inside
  6) Test out the new VPC ELB from outside
  7) Switch DNS over to the new VPC ELB, wait for it to
     propagate.
  8) Do a failover from your master to the replica inside.
  9) Same for memcached
  10) Shutdown everything in EC2 classic.
  11) Drinks

EDIT: formatting