I think if your setup requires a SAN, you're too big and enterprisy for EC2.
S3 has been working well for us. While the semantics are different than typical storage, I would argue that they are far from useless. Since files on S3 can be made publicly accessible via a web address, we use S3 to host our assets for our website (css, javascript, images), as well as db backups and other backups.
We have not had to design our app for EC2. We do make use of S3 for storing user data, so we have S3 libraries in our app, but I fail to see where the "designing our app for EC2" comes into play.
It seems like you answered your own question about persistent storage. S3 is persistent storage.
If you are running a database backed application on EC2 without a master/slave setup, and your master goes down, to me, that seems like a failure to plan for the worst on your end. It's really not an argument that even though you DO have persistent storage, your data is safe on that server. Your data is never safe. Hence, a backup/replication plan is ALWAYS needed. Services like EC2 force you to think about those plans and address them so that they are not a problem.
As for the slicehost option, we looked at them. We found that Amazon seemed to provide a much more robust service. Plus, Amazon has a LOT more resources to keep their service robust, as opposed to a startup with one datacenter.
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!
Your comment makes it apparent that you really don't understand how hosting a website works.
My company uses EC2 (plus a few other amazon services, which I find to be spectacular) for hosting our application. If we wanted to move to another server or company or datacenter, it's just a matter of setting up the new server and repointing the DNS. Also what is nonstandard about their servers? You basically set them up however you want. You want to run linux? cool. FreeBSD? awesome. Basically you can run any *NIX clone you please. Fortunately lots of people provide excellent templates, so rolling your own is not really necessary.
The kind of people that would watch a crappy version on their computers are NOT the people who would pay $9 to see it in the theatre. Will this affect anything? No.
It seems to me just like the MPAA pumping the press to make it look like a huge deal. It's not.
No dude, if you use linux, you're gonna be forced to have wobbly windows and put up with the low-end hardware accelerated bloat.
Geez... I saw the videos and it looks pretty sweet! If it's going to make my windows friends jealous, I'm on board. Will I use it on my linux desktop? You bet. Will I load it on my linux router? Uh, no.
I have a virtual number with Vonage. I have unlimited long distance for like $27 a month. That's cheaper than my cell phone and WAY cheaper than my land line used to be. I see a few flaws in your argument. First, it was easy to get a number that's still in my area code. They offered me many choices. Also, my address is tied to my phone, and a lot of modern pizza ships have the 911-like ability to get your address right when you call. Problem solved.
2nd, it's relatively cheap to add a virtual number. If I live in PA and my parents live in Florida, I could just add a florida number and tie it to my phone so they don't incur long distance charges when they call me. How cool is that?! That pretty much renders area codes obsolete alltogether. I really can't see how normal telcos can compete with that.
Much like Netscape did when it was in its death throes, I think it would be great if they could open up the source and allow an online community to develop for it.
Just think, in a year or so it could be the next iTunes killer..
black box voting has 5 (!) different demonstrations on how easy it is to hack these things. There is also an online book (in PDF format) all about how bad the situation really is.
This is serious. Not only are they using a microsoft access (!!) database to store your vote, they are using a non-password protected access database.
Not only are they using a non-password protected access database, you can gain access to the.mdb by hitting a certain key on the touch screen and manipulating at will. Are we living in crazy world?
I develop an enterprise-level hospital app at a large corporation for a living, and I had the same questions when I started.
Hospital hardware surely does run embedded systems. However, most parts of the hospital are probably kiosks running a web-based app that controls bed management, scheduling, the financial parts, etc.
They are running windows for the same reason they are using IBM Websphere for the app server instead of Apache Tomcat: liability. What happens when a patient dies because of a server crash? Who do you blame? Oh, we'll blame Microsoft or IBM for our own bugs. You don't have that luxury if you're using Tomcat and Linux. Yes, it's dirty, sleazy and nasty, but I have no control over it.
..because it looks too much like the scale that salary.com uses.
Right now, I'm a "software engineer III" according to my company and salary.com. But according to salary.com, I'm making $20k less than the median salary. My company's solution? Change their scale. Now there's like 8 levels and it doesn't match up at all. Maybe they're hoping that the mass exodus will stop?
The reason music is dead is very simple. There is no innovation.
Music is not dead. What a stupid sound bite. Music will never die. Perhaps the way the Big 5 get it to us might change.. perhaps their pricing model might change.. perhaps the Big 5 will dissolve themselves in a fit of greed. But on thing is for sure.. as long as there are humans, there will be music.
And yes, there still is GOOD music out there, but the Big 5 is not hocking that kind of music. Indie labels are tho. If you don't like Big 5's music, then stop caring and stop complaining and go figureout what the hell you DO like.
Most everyone I talk to thinks that top 40 music on the radio sucks. I happen to agree (except for 50 cent, haha)
I think I'm one of the few lucky enough to have lived by and grown up with an excellent college music station. Through their various shows and DJs, I've been able to find out what type(s) of music I'm really into, rather than having the Big 5 tell me what I like.
The moral of the story is that if you dig a little deeper than what's on the surface, you can find the real gold. I believe Indie bands always prove to have much more talent and creativity than the producer-molded garbage you hear on top 40 stations.
That said, Epitonic is a great site to listen to cool songs and figure out how to break away from that mainstream cycle.
less features, more security and stability = GOOD
on
Microsoft Clips Longhorn
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think it's good that they're scoping out features. This will allow the developers to concentrate on making the existing codebase actually work, rather than squandering resources to cram in a feature that works like ass and is rife with security holes.
And so it starts. How many of these exploits will be found based upon the source? Tons?
Just how bad is the source that a whole lot of exploits like these can be written? I wonder what this means for MSFT.
Can the same thing happen to linux? Or do exploit authors prefer windows?
Re:This is no new thing
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 1
But if you think you're going to get another 70ft/lbs of torque in a Honda Civic by just doing that, think again.
You can easily get 70+ ft/lbs of torque if your car is turbocharged. My 01 Jetta has the same engine as the GTI, but there is a 20hp difference. The ECU controls so much about how the engine is tuned that if a professional laboratory tunes it up, I can get 55hp and 80ft/lbs of torque simply upgrading the ECU. At around $600 it is *the* most cost effective and safe upgrade you can do for a turbocharged car. If something goes wrong, or if I I need to sell the car, bring it back tot he dealer, etc, I can easily switch it back to stock. No fuss, no muss.
Yeah, that's the problem. You see, I was in the bathroom with the textbook and... well, I ran out of toilet paper.. then I ran out of socks, so... well.. the textbook was next.
No wonder they only offered $16 for it. I had to bring it there in a ziplock bag!
- Wait a week or two before buying your books. That way you'll know if the professor will be using it throughout the course. Talk to other students who have taken the course and ask them if the professor used the book.
- See if said student still has the textbook for the class (and hasn't sold it for a $10 bag of pot), and ask to "borrow" it... or buy it in exchange for a $10 bag of pot... pot *is* a valid form of currency in college, you know.
- Check out all the online bookstores, but make sure they have the book in stock! I once got burned by a now-defunct online textbook site because the book I needed was back ordered for 6 weeks. Other than that, you can usually get some slick deals (almost anything is better than the campus bookstore).
I never gave in to selling my books back to the bookstore. They offered me $16 for the book I bought fot $120!! You gotta be kidding me.
I put the book for sale in the student paper, charged $50 for it. That's less than what the bookstore was selling it for used ($75). It's win/win for both me and the student I'm selling my book to. Fuck my student bookstore. They really do gouge as deep as possible.
Sometimes they would offer *nothing* for my expensive book.. because "a new edition is coming out and the professor will be using that book." And guess who wrote the book!
Seriously, it's a good racket they have going. Hmmm... maybe I should get into it.
"Ok, We'll need a disposable camera flash, an air compressor, an electronic sprinkler valve, and some pipe. This is gonna be a killer bong, man! Oh wait... look what else we can do with all this stuff!"
Slashdot Mirror
I think if your setup requires a SAN, you're too big and enterprisy for EC2.
S3 has been working well for us. While the semantics are different than typical storage, I would argue that they are far from useless. Since files on S3 can be made publicly accessible via a web address, we use S3 to host our assets for our website (css, javascript, images), as well as db backups and other backups.
We have not had to design our app for EC2. We do make use of S3 for storing user data, so we have S3 libraries in our app, but I fail to see where the "designing our app for EC2" comes into play.
It seems like you answered your own question about persistent storage. S3 is persistent storage.
If you are running a database backed application on EC2 without a master/slave setup, and your master goes down, to me, that seems like a failure to plan for the worst on your end. It's really not an argument that even though you DO have persistent storage, your data is safe on that server. Your data is never safe. Hence, a backup/replication plan is ALWAYS needed. Services like EC2 force you to think about those plans and address them so that they are not a problem.
As for the slicehost option, we looked at them. We found that Amazon seemed to provide a much more robust service. Plus, Amazon has a LOT more resources to keep their service robust, as opposed to a startup with one datacenter.
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!
Your comment makes it apparent that you really don't understand how hosting a website works.
My company uses EC2 (plus a few other amazon services, which I find to be spectacular) for hosting our application. If we wanted to move to another server or company or datacenter, it's just a matter of setting up the new server and repointing the DNS. Also what is nonstandard about their servers? You basically set them up however you want. You want to run linux? cool. FreeBSD? awesome. Basically you can run any *NIX clone you please. Fortunately lots of people provide excellent templates, so rolling your own is not really necessary.
The kind of people that would watch a crappy version on their computers are NOT the people who would pay $9 to see it in the theatre. Will this affect anything? No.
It seems to me just like the MPAA pumping the press to make it look like a huge deal. It's not.
Geez... I saw the videos and it looks pretty sweet! If it's going to make my windows friends jealous, I'm on board. Will I use it on my linux desktop? You bet. Will I load it on my linux router? Uh, no.
2nd, it's relatively cheap to add a virtual number. If I live in PA and my parents live in Florida, I could just add a florida number and tie it to my phone so they don't incur long distance charges when they call me. How cool is that?! That pretty much renders area codes obsolete alltogether. I really can't see how normal telcos can compete with that.
Much like Netscape did when it was in its death throes, I think it would be great if they could open up the source and allow an online community to develop for it.
Just think, in a year or so it could be the next iTunes killer..
black box voting has 5 (!) different demonstrations on how easy it is to hack these things. There is also an online book (in PDF format) all about how bad the situation really is.
.mdb by hitting a certain key on the touch screen and manipulating at will. Are we living in crazy world?
This is serious. Not only are they using a microsoft access (!!) database to store your vote, they are using a non-password protected access database.
Not only are they using a non-password protected access database, you can gain access to the
I develop an enterprise-level hospital app at a large corporation for a living, and I had the same questions when I started.
Hospital hardware surely does run embedded systems. However, most parts of the hospital are probably kiosks running a web-based app that controls bed management, scheduling, the financial parts, etc.
They are running windows for the same reason they are using IBM Websphere for the app server instead of Apache Tomcat: liability. What happens when a patient dies because of a server crash? Who do you blame? Oh, we'll blame Microsoft or IBM for our own bugs. You don't have that luxury if you're using Tomcat and Linux. Yes, it's dirty, sleazy and nasty, but I have no control over it.
well, I suppose a p2p-like solution could be coded. But of course, that solution would soon be illegal.
Nah, it reads correctly..
"So Fuck U!"
..because it looks too much like the scale that salary.com uses.
Right now, I'm a "software engineer III" according to my company and salary.com. But according to salary.com, I'm making $20k less than the median salary. My company's solution? Change their scale. Now there's like 8 levels and it doesn't match up at all. Maybe they're hoping that the mass exodus will stop?
Just play the game, man. Jeez, who the hell wears the pants in *your* relationship?
I think I speak for a collective 47.6% of all slashdotters when I say... WHA-PSSSH!!!
The reason music is dead is very simple. There is no innovation.
Music is not dead. What a stupid sound bite. Music will never die. Perhaps the way the Big 5 get it to us might change.. perhaps their pricing model might change.. perhaps the Big 5 will dissolve themselves in a fit of greed. But on thing is for sure.. as long as there are humans, there will be music.
And yes, there still is GOOD music out there, but the Big 5 is not hocking that kind of music. Indie labels are tho. If you don't like Big 5's music, then stop caring and stop complaining and go figure out what the hell you DO like.
Most everyone I talk to thinks that top 40 music on the radio sucks. I happen to agree (except for 50 cent, haha)
I think I'm one of the few lucky enough to have lived by and grown up with an excellent college music station. Through their various shows and DJs, I've been able to find out what type(s) of music I'm really into, rather than having the Big 5 tell me what I like.
The moral of the story is that if you dig a little deeper than what's on the surface, you can find the real gold. I believe Indie bands always prove to have much more talent and creativity than the producer-molded garbage you hear on top 40 stations.
That said, Epitonic is a great site to listen to cool songs and figure out how to break away from that mainstream cycle.
Boy, am I glad I don't make $27.63 an hour.
I think it's good that they're scoping out features. This will allow the developers to concentrate on making the existing codebase actually work, rather than squandering resources to cram in a feature that works like ass and is rife with security holes.
If they pay more than the paltry salary I'm making now, then draft me up!
And so it starts. How many of these exploits will be found based upon the source? Tons?
Just how bad is the source that a whole lot of exploits like these can be written? I wonder what this means for MSFT.
Can the same thing happen to linux? Or do exploit authors prefer windows?
But if you think you're going to get another 70ft/lbs of torque in a Honda Civic by just doing that, think again.
You can easily get 70+ ft/lbs of torque if your car is turbocharged. My 01 Jetta has the same engine as the GTI, but there is a 20hp difference. The ECU controls so much about how the engine is tuned that if a professional laboratory tunes it up, I can get 55hp and 80ft/lbs of torque simply upgrading the ECU. At around $600 it is *the* most cost effective and safe upgrade you can do for a turbocharged car. If something goes wrong, or if I I need to sell the car, bring it back tot he dealer, etc, I can easily switch it back to stock. No fuss, no muss.
You are full of shit, pal.
Yeah, that's the problem. You see, I was in the bathroom with the textbook and... well, I ran out of toilet paper.. then I ran out of socks, so... well.. the textbook was next.
No wonder they only offered $16 for it. I had to bring it there in a ziplock bag!
- Wait a week or two before buying your books. That way you'll know if the professor will be using it throughout the course. Talk to other students who have taken the course and ask them if the professor used the book.
- See if said student still has the textbook for the class (and hasn't sold it for a $10 bag of pot), and ask to "borrow" it... or buy it in exchange for a $10 bag of pot... pot *is* a valid form of currency in college, you know.
- Check out all the online bookstores, but make sure they have the book in stock! I once got burned by a now-defunct online textbook site because the book I needed was back ordered for 6 weeks. Other than that, you can usually get some slick deals (almost anything is better than the campus bookstore).
I never gave in to selling my books back to the bookstore. They offered me $16 for the book I bought fot $120!! You gotta be kidding me.
I put the book for sale in the student paper, charged $50 for it. That's less than what the bookstore was selling it for used ($75). It's win/win for both me and the student I'm selling my book to. Fuck my student bookstore. They really do gouge as deep as possible.
Sometimes they would offer *nothing* for my expensive book.. because "a new edition is coming out and the professor will be using that book." And guess who wrote the book!
Seriously, it's a good racket they have going. Hmmm... maybe I should get into it.
I can see it now..
"Ok, We'll need a disposable camera flash, an air compressor, an electronic sprinkler valve, and some pipe. This is gonna be a killer bong, man! Oh wait... look what else we can do with all this stuff!"