Amazon EC2 Now More Ready for Application Hosting

For months now, I've been geeked about Amazon's EC2 as a web hosting service. But until today, in my opinion, it wasn't ready for prime time. Now it is, for two reasons. One, you can get static IPs, so if an outward-facing VM goes down you can quickly start another one and point your site's traffic to it without waiting for DNS propagation. And two, you can now separate your VMs into "physically distinct, independent infrastructure" zones, so you can plan to keep your site up if a tornado takes out one NOC. If I were developing a new website I'd host it there; buying or leasing real hardware for a startup seems silly. If you have questions, or especially if you know something about other companies' virtual hosting options, post comments -- let's compare notes.

Comments

I have a question:

[Megaweapon]

Is this a Slashvertisement?

Re:It's too proprietary

[nacturation]

If you're using Amazon for hosting, you can't switch hosting services; their system is too nonstandard. Do you want to be in a position where they can raise prices or cut off your air supply? EC2 allows you to setup your own servers on their infrastructure. Ultimately, this is as standard as getting a virtual or dedicated server at any one of thousands of other hosting providers. Switching is as easy as replicating the environment you've created for yourself (which is likely a standard LAMP stack anyways) and then doing a DNS change.

Re:IPv6

[tolan-b]

I suspect only tunneled over IPv4.

What I'm personally waiting for from EC2 is European datacentres, as I have an application that's latency sensitive. :(

Re:No persistent storage; not great value

[dubl-u]

Well, look at Slicehost and you can get [...] WITH persistent storage

The Amazon machines offer storage that persists for the life of the virtual instance. That's until you kill the instance or until the hardware fails. (It does persist through reboots and OS crashes.) And unless Slicehost is running some crazy magic beyond the RAID-10 setup they mention, a hardware failure could still wipe out your data, and will certainly cause downtime during which you will have an opportunity to wonder when and whether your data is coming back.

If you run some stats, it could well be that the Slicehost "persistent" storage does indeed persist longer. That'd be my guess. But it's possible that the Amazon "non-persistent" storage is actually more stable. That depends on the quality of hardware and maintenance at both companies, factors that you cannot know. Meaning that if reliability is really important to you, you must plan for either kind of storage eventually failing. And if reliability isn't that important to you, then you're planning to depend on your backups anyhow, in which case Amazon doesn't seem so bad either.

I think the main difference between Amazon and the more typical providers regarding persistence is that Amazon's experience has taught them to assume that everything fails, and so you should engineer for that. EC2 and S3 are built around that, and are very frank about what they provide. It seemed weird at first, but now I like it better.

Re:IPV6? How about an SLA!

[aminorex]

That depends a lot on the scale of your operation and the scale of your hosting service. The value of an SLA is that you can sue to recover damages in case of non-compliance. But it may not be possible to recover real damages in court: Your provider may not have pockets that deep, you may not have pockets as deep as your lawyers' thirst for money, and the law may not allow for full recovery in your circumstance.

EC2 is up and stays up. Reliabilty counts for a lot more than legal recourse, in my book. SLAs don't create reliability, they *help* (hopefully) to create legal recourse, which is a very poor substitute.