Amazon S3, EC2
I noticed something strange on my parent’s Senseo. First, it seems to take longer to boot up than mine. I should investigate this and do some benchmarks. And second, the “auto shut-off” function doesn’t work. The Senseos have differents versions but mine is older. I really don’t have a good explication; I can only suppose that my parents’ machine is more used. I will keep you updated on this.
Besides this, I have been looking at Amazon’s S3 and EC2. While I think EC2 is more adapted for computing than for web services, it can help to manage the scalability.
EC2 is a service to run virtual machines (”instances”). Sure, you can build an (almost) complete virtual web infrastructure if you want. But if you want reverse proxy and load balancing, it’s up to you. You have to configure everything yourself. While this is interesting (and fun) to do, it will take a lot of time to build and maintain. Or you can use solutions like scalr or weoceo. The first is free and open source but very young and the second costs and is not so fine-tunable. Those solutions integrate load-balancing and managing tools.
S3 is the storage solution. It stores juste simple files (”buckets”) and the virtual machine images. The most important is that EC2/S3 lacks database support. Sure you can use S3 to backup the database but that’s just a hack and I wouldn’t recommend it for production use.
I think of EC2/S3 is not going to replace a real server for a web service but I still think about it for the scalability. Or to answer traffic spikes, like what Judd Vinet did (see http://hostingfu.com/article/setting-up-part-time-web-cluster-with-amazons-ec2).
I will continue to investigate Amazon’s services’ use for commentag. Stay tuned.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:04 am
You should have a look at Amazon SimpleDB. Recent additions to the EC2 service makes it more suitable for web services (Fixed ip address, …)