
Amazon EC2 gets statistics, auto scaling and elastic load balancing - ropiku
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/05/new-aws-load-balancing-automatic-scaling-and-cloud-monitoring-services.html
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rjurney
How many startups does this put out of business?

This keeps happening repeatedly - so let there be no more startups offering
missing features of EC2. Go back! Build something else! Amazon has made it
clear that you should not build a general cloud offering on top of EC2 - it
must be niche, or not an enhancement of their offering, or they will simply do
the same thing and kill you. And I don't think its that they're copying
anyone. They've given lots of notice. Its just that their product vision fits
with most anyone's who looks at what EC2 is missing.

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luigi
Check out the marketing language for RightScale:

<http://www.rightscale.com/>

Their "Key Features": (1) Auto-Scaling, (2) Monitoring & Alerting, (3) Load
Balancing. Ouch.

But you're right -- the opportunity to provide unique value is in harnessing
EC2 for specific purposes and applications.

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tve
Yeah, our marketing web site has gotten old, and it'll change within a couple
of days. We haven't been selling auto-scaling and assorted features for a
while. As Amazon is moving up the stack so are we. We're integrating a lot of
the various features and really provide a platform for all the config
management, automation, access control, etc. Plus pre-configured stacks that
you can fully customize. If you actually try to use Amazon's monitoring and
auto-scaling you'll find you have a lot of wheels to reinvent...

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boundlessdreamz
In the case of websites, auto scaling is useful only if your application is
not too dependent on DB but most web apps have DB as the bottle neck. The way
auto scaling works is to launch new instances but that works only for
application servers. You can't autoscale a DB by launching new instances.

So, even though this feature is useful it is not taking away the biggest
headache in website scaling..i.e how to scale your DB.

~~~
wensing
Does anything prohibit someone from hacking together a way to scale their DB
using this service? i.e. fire up instances that of a certain ilk? Not sure how
detailed CloudWatch is, but you could conceivably automate anything that
involves looking at numbers and taking steps to reduce load on your DB.

~~~
ianso
Hum, funny you say that, that's exactly what I'm working on:
<http://code.google.com/p/hotrepart/> The idea is to repartition a DB across
multiple hosts while it's running. It's only a demonstrator project right now.

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ezmobius
Here's my take on these features...

Monitoring and autoscaling I'll pass on. You can get better monitoring with
collectd for free and autoscaling based on just load age or disk util and not
app specific stuff is plain crazy.

The load balancer is pretty nice but I'll stick with haproxy until you can do
httpand https on the same lb and also currently you can only do CNAME dns so
no foo.com only www.foo.com and wildcard subdomains don't work unless you use
tinydns(bind can't do it)

So I feel like this is a good start but I won't be using any of these services
until they get more fully baked. The load balancer is the most interesting
part but is currently seriously flawed.

~~~
ezmobius
I guess I spoke too soon and they did add support for multiple ports through
the sam lb access point. So http and https can be served from the same lb.
This makes the lb much more interesting.

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siculars
amazons offering adds a pricing model to this space. if anything, i think
amazons move into this space, although certainly anticipated, validates those
that are also competing here. others who wish to compete know the price/value
proposition they need to meet in order to have a chance.

<http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/>

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wensing
As a startup based on EC2, our greatest risk last year was not scaling in time
to meet demand (yes, even on EC2). That makes this fantastic news.

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1gor
How long before they start offering the full commodity application stacks?
LAMP is the same on every shared host.

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techpeace
You can already use publicly-available AMIs that contain a wide variety of
application stacks.

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antirez
While in my company we are loving S3 since it's really cheap and good, we
can't say the same for EC2: the small instances are too slow, and the bigger
instances are too costly and still can't compare with a decent Linux box.
Overall we made our math and to have our servers in the server farm is going
to cost less compared to EC2. Of course it's not going to be as simple to
manage as EC2 is, but it is an acceptable compromise for now.

I think that here there is space for new startups _if_ they are able to
provide better performances at the same cost. I wonder if a configuration
where in a cloud real hardware is selected in order to run an instance could
work, instead to use virtualization technologies. This does not allow to take
advantage of the fact that most boxes are not under high load most of the
time, but maybe could work if it will be possible to use very low energy in
this condition.

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neilc
AWS CloudWatch seems remarkably expensive: 15 cents per instance per hour!
Considering that all they are doing is aggregating and distributing per-VM
statistics.

Woops: Brainfade. Yes, 1.5 cents/instance/hour, not 10x that. Still, quite
expensive I think.

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WALoeIII
From the Amazon page its $0.015/hr:

With Amazon CloudWatch... at a rate of $0.015 per hour for each Amazon EC2
instance you choose to monitor...

As an example, a developer may want to monitor 10 Amazon EC2 instances 24×7
for a 30-day period. The Amazon CloudWatch cost would be $108 (or $0.015 per
Amazon EC2 instance hour x 10 Amazon EC2 instances x 24 hours per day x 30
days)...

That is close to what it costs to run a single instance to collect all your
statistics (75$ if its small + your time is worth something!).

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neilc
Yeah, my bad. Still, I think it's quite expensive. If all they are offering is
some simple runtime stats, then a 15% surcharge on the cost of a small
instance is pretty expensive. If you have 50 instances, you're paying
$540/month just for _monitoring_.

 _That is close to what it costs to run a single instance to collect all your
statistics_

Assuming you need a completely separate instance which couldn't do anything
else but monitoring, which is unlikely to be the case.

~~~
wmf
Think of it as a bailout for the third-party cloud monitoring startups; at
least they have a chance to be cheaper than Amazon.

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kuvkir
Does auto scaling mean my instance will grow in ram/cpu/other resources or
i'll be just given more new instances?

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tybris
Hot-CPU/memory switch would be a little freaky.

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mseebach
It's here, it's simple, and it works..

Usage: xm mem-set <Domain> <Mem>

Set the current memory usage for a domain.

Usage: xm vcpu-set <Domain> <vCPUs>

Set the number of active VCPUs for allowed for the domain.

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polvi
If anyone is willing to share... Who here does this solve a specific problem
for, and are you actively/planning on implementing it ASAP? What is your use
case? It's a sweet feature, and I can't wait to see how it manifests in the
hands of hackers.

~~~
nethergoat
We have several application components that use software load balancers
(HAProxy) so we can manually scale each component quickly. The load balancing
service will let us shut down each of those instances for a decent savings.
Our QA environment is a copy of prod (scaled-back, but identical, including
LBs) - more nodes to shut down, more money saved.

This is easy to implement and is basically found money, so we'll be doing it
ASAP.

My expectation is that an Amazon (LB) access point is more reliable than a
generic EC2 instance. For these components, we'll be paying less for something
that's both more reliable (hopefully) and easier to manage.

Auto-scaling is powerful and easy to set up (even in the private beta, before
tools were available), but as we're heavily integrated with RightScale
(specifically, using templates throughout) migrating to pre-configured AMIs
would take some effort. We'll have to do some internal review before making a
decision on rolling out auto-scaling to existing apps.

Monitoring is, as expected, also provided by RightScale. Amazon requires you
have CloudWatch turned on for instances in auto-scaled pools (for obvious
reasons), so that's one way we may end up using it. RightScale's blog post
mentioned they'll be integrating their alerting and reporting with CloudWatch,
but I'm not sure it's worth the extra $0.015/intance-hour to have the data
come from Amazon instead of RightScale. I expect that, for now, CloudWatch is
more relevant to: 1) users not on RightScale, Cloudkick, etc. 2) users who
want direct access to their monitoring data (for archival, custom graphs,
whatever - not currently possible with RightScale, not sure about other cloud
management vendors)

Amazon's move up the application stack (Elastic MapReduce, for starters) may
create additional use cases for CloudWatch, but that's entirely up to Amazon.

What I'd really like to see in the near-term is an open source tool to read in
and graph CloudWatch data that's been archived somewhere (SimpleDB would be
cool, but S3 would work too). Of course, I can see why people would be
hesitant to start down that path given that Amazon has a console that's
begging to include this functionality.

-Mike B @ ShareThis

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tlrobinson
It's not clear whether Auto Scaling can only be based on inputs from
CloudWatch, or your own inputs as well. Anyone know?

Also, you better trust Amazon to fairly determine when to scale up... more
instances == more profit for them.

~~~
pierrefar
The day someone comes up with solid evidence that they are using the system to
skim money off unsuspecting customers is Amazon's last day as a hosting
company.

Trust of a web host is of paramount importance. I know a lot of people who
stuck with more expensive hosts just because they trust them and have a good
working relationship with them.

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baog
really sad that they only provide a cname and you can;t associate Elastic IP
to it. You can;t point it to your root domain....

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erlanger
The load balancer seems nice. We used HAProxy, but it seemed like the sort of
thing that Amazon could easily take care of on their own. I see that it has
health checks, but I wonder if it's generally as nice and configurable as
HAProxy.

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jf
Elastic Load Balancing isn't yet a replacement for HAProxy, for now it only
seems to handle HTTP traffic, and not HTTPS:
[http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/lates...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/US_SettingUpLoadBalancerHTTPS.html)

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ujeezy
I don't think HAProxy supports SSL either, does it? I had to put an nginx
layer in front of HAProxy to get SSL working.

~~~
erlanger
HAProxy certainly supports SSL.

~~~
Poleris
Reference or tutorial?

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ckinnan
"UP with me! up with me into the clouds!

For thy song, Lark, is strong;

Up with me, up with me into the clouds!

Singing, singing,

With clouds and sky about thee ringing,

Lift me, guide me till I find

That spot which seems so to thy mind!"

\--William Wordsworth

