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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.
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So here's a little about what EC2 actually is, for those of you who don't know. You don't have to reply here, start your own comments ;)
The Elastic Compute Cloud was originally designed as a way to host applications that needed lots of CPUs, and the option to expand by adding more CPUs. It's a hosting service that lets you start up virtual machines to run any software you want: they have a wide variety of pre-packaged open-source operating systems you can pick to start up your VMs with.
Starting up a VM takes just a minute or two, and it's point-and-click thanks to the Firefox extension. Each VM comes in one of three sizes: small (webhead), large (database), and extra large (bigass database). They cost respectively $72, $288, and $576 a month (billed by the hour), plus bandwidth ($0.18/GB out, somewhat cheaper for data going in and there's a price break at 10 TB).
One of the concerns everyone raises with hosting on virtual machines is that if a VM instance goes down, you lose everything on it. It comes with hard drive storage (160 GB on the small size), but if something goes wrong, that data's gone.
I think the rejoinder here is that, on real hardware, if something goes wrong, your data's gone. You never set up an enterprise-level website on the assumption that any particular hardware has to survive. Single points of failure are always a mistake, and backups are always a necessity. When any machine explodes - real or virtual - the question is how fast your system recovers to "working well enough" (seconds, hopefully) and then how long it takes you to get it "back to normal" behind the scenes (hours, hopefully). Those answers shouldn't depend on whether there's a physical drive to yank out of a dead physical machine that may or may not retain valid data.
Which brings up what I think is one of the selling points of EC2: free fast bandwidth to S3, Amazon's near-infinite-size, redundantly-replicated data storage platform. That's a nice backup option to have available. That's part of why, if I were starting a new web service, I wouldn't host it on real hardware. I'd like not having to worry about backups, tapes, offsite copies... bleah, let someone else worry about it.
Slashdot hasn't run many stories on EC2 (none that I know of) because until now it's been a niche service. Without a way to guarantee that you can have a static IP, there had been a single point of failure: if your outward-facing VMs all went down, your only recourse was to start up more VMs on new, dynamically-assigned IPs, point your DNS to them, and wait hours for your users' DNS caches to expire. That meant that while it may have been a good service for sites that needed to do massive private computation, it was an unacceptable hosting service.
Now with static IPs, you basically set up your service to have several VMs which provide the outward-facing service (maybe running a webserver, or a reverse proxy for your internal webservers), and you point your public, static IPs at those. If one or more of them goes down, you start up new copies of those VMs and repoint the IPs to them. No DNS changes required.
I know there are other companies offering web hosting through virtual servers. Please share information about them, the more we all know the better.
The more I learn about Amazon's AWS offerings... the more confused I get. I've read a TON of material, reviewed the APIs, looked at sites built on this platform and have read many blog entries. I feel like I "know" a lot, but understand very little. Someone help?
1. What is a perfect "typical" application for AWS? (And don't answer, "one that needs to scale...". I'm looking for a realworld example.)
2. Anyone here on Slashdot using these services? Nervous about single point of failure? (And I don't mean just technical, but also financial, legal, security, business continuity, etc.)
3. EC2 / S3: is there any value in using just one? I've noticed there are additional services now, too
4. In the days of SOx / PCI / CISP compliance, is it even possible to set up a financial app on AWS?
5. Also, finally, maybe a question to Amazon... why? Someone did the financials recently and it was a fascinating study. The short of it is that at max capacity, the net income from all of AWS for Amazon is so tiny, you have to wonder why they even bothered... [need citation]
A classic case of wanting to like the technology, but not really sure how to use it. Thanks.
My company uses EC2 + S3 + SQS + Rightscale (http://rightscale.com) to manage our infrastructure.
First off, Amazon has an excellent product. It is essentially Hardware As A Service, and the tools they provide abstract it as such.
The most common argument against using EC2 for hosting is that if your server goes down, you will lose any data created since the last time you saved a snapshot. While this is true, it forces you to bring a backup + recovery plan to the front of the table. Provided you have a backup + recovery plan in place, you no longer have to worry about fixing a server ever again. If something goes wrong with one of our application servers, I would simply fire up a new instance, link it in with DNS, and terminate the old server. With rightscale, this is all pushbutton.
Consider that scenario with running your own colo server. You could potentially spend hours diagnosing + fixing an issue with a server before you could bring it back up. Ok fine, the way to mitigate that is to have a hot backup running. But now we're talking about a ton of cash to support 2 servers on a month-to-month basis. We have found that amazon's costs to run EC2 instances are very competitive for the specs.
Note: I'm not a shill for either rightscale or amazon, I just find that these 2 companies are the forefront of where hosting is going, and their products are awesome. It's all about virtualization!
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST