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AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python

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Re: AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python

#21

Post by bromley »

spicyj wrote: post #3

Has anyone here used Elastic Beanstalk? What were your experiences?

I've been using the Java version of Beanstalk to run a commercial API - http://www.degreedays.net/api/ - for about 12 months.

So far it's been working out very well. I love how you can dip into the EC2 APIs if/when you need to, but it's not usually necessary as the basic setup is excellent (a load balancer in front of one or more EC2 instances - your choice of number, type, and auto-scaling rules).

The tools for updating a Java app are great. Each deployed version of your app gets stored in the AWS system, and you can rollback to any version with a couple of clicks in the AWS control panel.

It's also pretty easy to set up a staging environment to test new versions before deploying them to the live environment. Only issue I have with that is that there's no way to pause a staging environment (like you can pause an EC2 instance and not pay for it while it's paused). So you either have to keep a staging environment running all the time (paying for its EC2 instances), or set one up afresh each time you need it. The latter isn't a huge hassle, but it would be much better if you could just set one up and keep it paused for most of the time.

I think development on Beanstalk is nicely approachable, and in my experience it's been pretty reliable as well, or at least as reliable as EC2. The current version of our app has been running well, with moderate load, for several months, without so much as a restart of an EC2 instance. On two occasions 6+ months ago one of the EC2 instances went a bit screwy, having problems connecting to external URLs, but in both cases we just terminated the problem instance and Beanstalk did the rest (provisioning a replacement and putting it behind the load balancer). We could probably avoid that sort of problem in future by improving our internal monitoring (in conjunction with the beanstalk health checks that ping a URL on each EC2 instance at frequent intervals to check for problems).

Re: AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python

#22

Post by michaelt »

bialecki wrote: post #15
dudus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never tried it but I guess you can use SQS for queues on AWS. http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/

If you go with SQS, keep in mind it doesn't guarantee that messages will be received exactly once[1]. I've used SQS for large projects and this was killer because we had to implement message locking ourselves to prevent messages from being processed twice. Since then, this has been a deal breaker for using SQS again (now use Celery). [1] http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/faqs/#How_many_times_will_I_receiv...

I was under the impression [1] that a message would only be received more than once if the first attempt at processing failed to complete in the lock time - for example if the queue consumer crashed. Is it more complicated than that?

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/#functionality

Re: AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python

#23

Post by bthomas »

Is that really their official blog? I'm not usually one to care about a professional looking UI, but I feel like it matters here. A non tech boss is going to see this next to cloud.google and have a tremendous bias, regardless of what his/her tech people think

Re: AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python

#24

Post by ozataman »

bialecki wrote: post #15
dudus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never tried it but I guess you can use SQS for queues on AWS. http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/

If you go with SQS, keep in mind it doesn't guarantee that messages will be received exactly once[1]. I've used SQS for large projects and this was killer because we had to implement message locking ourselves to prevent messages from being processed twice. Since then, this has been a deal breaker for using SQS again (now use Celery). [1] http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/faqs/#How_many_times_will_I_receiv...

Sorry, but lol. You had to implement locking on top of a job queueing system to make it work? That's the whole point of a queueing system!!!

You probably didn't realize you had to extend the lock peeiodically.

Re: AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python

#26

Post by nikcub »

bthomas wrote: post #23

Is that really their official blog? I'm not usually one to care about a professional looking UI, but I feel like it matters here. A non tech boss is going to see this next to cloud.google and have a tremendous bias, regardless of what his/her tech people think

Hosted on Typepad, which apparently still exists. That blog template is probably 10 years old

Re: AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python

#27

Post by nikcub »

antonp wrote: post #25

I wonder if this will lead to Heroku reviewing their pricing plans sooner than expected. Elastic Beanstalk is catching up, AppFog had their public launch recently... they must be feeling the heat.

Heroku's main supplier is competing with them, so they need to provide a better value add layer than Amazon can to justify the price or get off AWS, do it themselves (not easy) and take that part of the margin

Re: AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python

#28

Post by lee »

bromley wrote: post #21
spicyj wrote: post #3

Has anyone here used Elastic Beanstalk? What were your experiences?

I've been using the Java version of Beanstalk to run a commercial API - http://www.degreedays.net/api/ - for about 12 months. So far it's been working out very well. I love how you can dip into the EC2 APIs if/when you need to, but it's not usually necessary as the basic setup is excellent (a load balancer in front of one or more EC2 instances - your choice of number, type, and auto-scaling rules). The tools for upda…

Can you tell me the reason you'd want to run a load balancer in front of a single instance? I read the feature spec for the elastic load balancer and can't it out.

Re: AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python

#29

Post by bromley »

lee wrote: post #28
bromley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using the Java version of Beanstalk to run a commercial API - http://www.degreedays.net/api/ - for about 12 months. So far it's been working out very well. I love how you can dip into the EC2 APIs if/when you need to, but it's not usually necessary as the basic setup is excellent (a load balancer in front of one or more EC2 instances - your choice of number, type, and auto-scaling rules). The tools for upda…

Can you tell me the reason you'd want to run a load balancer in front of a single instance? I read the feature spec for the elastic load balancer and can't it out.

If you have one single instance only, I'm not sure there is any point. But if you want your app to auto-scale upwards to add EC2 instances if the load increases, then the load balancer is necessary. It enables all your EC2 instances to be accessible via one public URL (as the elastic load balancer forwards requests on).

I set it up such that we always have at least 2 EC2 instances, in separate availability zones, so that, if one goes down, at least the other is likely to keep working. And then it auto-scales upwards from there, if the load gets high enough.

The load balancer is pretty much transparent as far as you the developer is concerned. You don't need to configure it - beanstalk does that - and it scales completely transparently (unlike the EC2 instances, for which you do need to define auto-scaling rules if you want that).

I may be missing some subtleties as I'm far from being an AWS expert... Just been picking bits up here and there through using beanstalk and a few of the other APIs for extra bits and bobs.

Re: AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python

#30

Post by EwanToo »

lee wrote: post #28
bromley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using the Java version of Beanstalk to run a commercial API - http://www.degreedays.net/api/ - for about 12 months. So far it's been working out very well. I love how you can dip into the EC2 APIs if/when you need to, but it's not usually necessary as the basic setup is excellent (a load balancer in front of one or more EC2 instances - your choice of number, type, and auto-scaling rules). The tools for upda…

Can you tell me the reason you'd want to run a load balancer in front of a single instance? I read the feature spec for the elastic load balancer and can't it out.

There's 2 main reasons. 1, if the AZ that your single instance is running in dies completely, ELB can help fire up a new instance in another zone quickly without having to handle re-routing DNS, etc. 2 if you need extra capacity in a hurry (e.g. you just got linked from HN and 10,000 people sign up), you can add more instances without re-achitecting.

Whether it's worth paying for those capabilities is always up to you though.. :)

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