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AWS Management Console - Auto Scaling Support

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Re: AWS Management Console - Auto Scaling Support

#41
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried the new c3 instances?

For the last 2 days i have a script that is trying to allocate a c3 instance with no luck. AWS is having crazy capacity problems in us-east (all zones).

Same here. The ones we've managed to snag have been great, but it has made it difficult to scale out in a few situations when they haven't had the capacity.

Re: AWS Management Console - Auto Scaling Support

#42

A question for other startups running a small time stack on top of AWS - how are you managing your scale up/scale down/fault tolerance on top of EC2 ? For a small startup, we are not really talking OpsWorks - so what tools allow you to do this. I'm trying to do this in a really small way for a project - but there are way too many deployment/monitoring/management tools to wrap my head around.

Along the same lines, I'm interested in how people handle the case of auto-scaling their web app (or anything that updates frequently via deploys). Is there a better solution than imaging a machine on every deploy and updating the auto scaling group to use the new AMI?

Re: AWS Management Console - Auto Scaling Support

#43
post #31
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People still use Google AppEngine with its outrageous pricing?

Thanks for the downvote, but my experience is that for a relatively small project we started to receive $200+ monthly bills and had to switch to EC2.

FWIW, I'm currently maintaining a project that does half a billion API calls per month for ~$400/month

Re: AWS Management Console - Auto Scaling Support

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the last 2 days i have a script that is trying to allocate a c3 instance with no luck. AWS is having crazy capacity problems in us-east (all zones).

in my experince its only us-east-1a that is having problems. i can get instances in b, c, and d no problem. c3.large instances are awesome!

Keep in mind that your us-east-1a is not necessarily the same as someone else's us-east-1a as they randomly assign the names to reduce the effect of everyone congregating in us-east-1a because it sounds like the best one.

Re: AWS Management Console - Auto Scaling Support

#45
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to protect people from shooting themselves in the foot with exorbitant bills As a matter of fact this is why new EC2 instances don't get swap -- running into swap can cost a pretty penny.

What do you mean by this? You can swap to local (ephemeral storage) at no charge. Or you can created a provisioned IOPS EBS volume and swap all you'd like. There's no separate I/O charge for these volumes.

Hi Jeff!

I assume this is a reference to the charge per 1M I/O requests on EBS.

Re: AWS Management Console - Auto Scaling Support

#46

A question for other startups running a small time stack on top of AWS - how are you managing your scale up/scale down/fault tolerance on top of EC2 ? For a small startup, we are not really talking OpsWorks - so what tools allow you to do this. I'm trying to do this in a really small way for a project - but there are way too many deployment/monitoring/management tools to wrap my head around.

Along the same lines, I'm interested in how people handle the case of auto-scaling their web app (or anything that updates frequently via deploys). Is there a better solution than imaging a machine on every deploy and updating the auto scaling group to use the new AMI?

How are you deploying? You 'should' push a tarball to s3 and have web nodes pull it down.

Red-black deploys via AMI changes are one way for sure, but those seem to be usually done via separate scaling groups entirely. Netflix has a lot of automation around this (see Asgard and AMInator)

Re: AWS Management Console - Auto Scaling Support

#47
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to protect people from shooting themselves in the foot with exorbitant bills As a matter of fact this is why new EC2 instances don't get swap -- running into swap can cost a pretty penny.

What do you mean by this? You can swap to local (ephemeral storage) at no charge. Or you can created a provisioned IOPS EBS volume and swap all you'd like. There's no separate I/O charge for these volumes.

You can, but it doesn't come on by default.

Re: AWS Management Console - Auto Scaling Support

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in my experince its only us-east-1a that is having problems. i can get instances in b, c, and d no problem. c3.large instances are awesome!

Keep in mind that your us-east-1a is not necessarily the same as someone else's us-east-1a as they randomly assign the names to reduce the effect of everyone congregating in us-east-1a because it sounds like the best one.

really? thats hilarious. thanks for the info.
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