access:amazon_cloud_computing
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| Amazon's EC2 service allows customers to dynamically create and deploy Linux or Window servers. You pay an hourly rate based on the performance of the server. A basic server with 1.7gb of memory and an approx. 1.5ghz equivalent processor runs $0.085/hour. Prices climb quickly as you require higher performance machines. You can select from a huge variety of server configurations. You can also modify the configuration, create a bootable image from it, store the image in S3 and directly boot from that. For example, I started with the most basic Fedora 8 configuration they had and installed Sun's Java 1.6 distribution (required by the Agtek Access Server). I created an Amazon AMI image directly from the machine and stored it to our S3 account. I can now use that image anytime I want to launch a new server. There is local storage associated with the running server but it is NOT persistent. To store persisted data your application must use either S3 or EBS. | Amazon's EC2 service allows customers to dynamically create and deploy Linux or Window servers. You pay an hourly rate based on the performance of the server. A basic server with 1.7gb of memory and an approx. 1.5ghz equivalent processor runs $0.085/hour. Prices climb quickly as you require higher performance machines. You can select from a huge variety of server configurations. You can also modify the configuration, create a bootable image from it, store the image in S3 and directly boot from that. For example, I started with the most basic Fedora 8 configuration they had and installed Sun's Java 1.6 distribution (required by the Agtek Access Server). I created an Amazon AMI image directly from the machine and stored it to our S3 account. I can now use that image anytime I want to launch a new server. There is local storage associated with the running server but it is NOT persistent. To store persisted data your application must use either S3 or EBS. | ||
| - | ==== Amazon RDS - Relation Database Service ==== | + | ==== Amazon RDS - Relational Database Service ==== |
| Amazon's RDS service is similar to EC2 except that it is completely focused on providing MySQL 5.1 compliant servers. You pay an hourly rate which is slightly higher but similar to the EC2 rate to run a fully configured and managed MySQL 5.1 server. Additionally you pay a monthly fee for the database storage associated with the server. Included in the cost is a nightly backup with single day retention. Multiple day retention is available but may cost extra (depends on storage requirements). For my tests I used a basic machine with 5gb of persistent storage. | Amazon's RDS service is similar to EC2 except that it is completely focused on providing MySQL 5.1 compliant servers. You pay an hourly rate which is slightly higher but similar to the EC2 rate to run a fully configured and managed MySQL 5.1 server. Additionally you pay a monthly fee for the database storage associated with the server. Included in the cost is a nightly backup with single day retention. Multiple day retention is available but may cost extra (depends on storage requirements). For my tests I used a basic machine with 5gb of persistent storage. | ||
| - | ==== Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Storage ==== | + | ==== Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store ==== |
| - | Amazon's EBS service allows customers to buy the equivalent of a raided disk system and attach it to a running EC2 server. Disk sizes range from 5gb to 1tb. They claim that reliability is 10 times that of a standard raid disk system but the details are a bit sketchy. If additional reliability is required the EBS can be backed up to your S3 account. The advantage of EBS over S3 is that EBS can be formatted to act just like a local hard disk. I did not test this product as I didn't need persistent storage for the tests. | + | Amazon's EBS service allows customers to buy the equivalent of a raided disk system and attach it to a running EC2 server. Disk sizes range from 5gb to 1tb. They claim that reliability is 10 times that of a standard raid disk system but the details are a bit sketchy. If additional reliability is required the EBS can be backed up to an S3 account. The advantage of EBS over S3 is that EBS can be formatted to act just like a local hard disk. I did not test this product as I did not need persistent storage for the tests. |
| ==== Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service ==== | ==== Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service ==== | ||
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| ===== Final Analysis ===== | ===== Final Analysis ===== | ||
| - | In the end I was able to get our Access Server running on a distributed system utilizing 1 EC2 and 1 RDS. Performance seemed comparable to what we get out of our lab systems, maybe even better as Amazon has a bigger network pipe than we do. Given the CPU and memory loads shown by our simple load tests I think we could use the smallest servers for the loads we'll be experiencing in the near term. | + | In the end I was able to get our Access Server running on a distributed system utilizing 1 EC2 and 1 RDS. Performance seemed comparable to what we get out of our lab systems, maybe even better as Amazon has a bigger network pipe than we do. Given the CPU and memory loads shown by our simple load tests I think we could use the smallest servers for the loads we'll be experiencing in the near future. |
| A basic system with 1 EC2 server, 1 RDS server and plenty of disk space for both would cost well under $200/month. As we sell the service we can easily upgrade to bigger, faster, more expensive servers. | A basic system with 1 EC2 server, 1 RDS server and plenty of disk space for both would cost well under $200/month. As we sell the service we can easily upgrade to bigger, faster, more expensive servers. | ||
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| ==== The Ugly ==== | ==== The Ugly ==== | ||
| - Need to have some basic linux system administration skills to manage everything | - Need to have some basic linux system administration skills to manage everything | ||
| - | - Some of the online documentation is out of date and incorrect | + | - Too many things have to be done by hand, using command line utilities |
| - Only free support through user forums and online documentation | - Only free support through user forums and online documentation | ||
| + | - Some of the online documentation is out of date and incorrect | ||
access/amazon_cloud_computing.1259177747.txt.gz · Last modified: 2012/10/10 17:08 (external edit)
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