

Mosso Cloud Servers vs. EC2: Persistent vs. Ephemeral Storage - wmf
http://blog.mosso.com/2009/04/cloud-servers-and-ec2-why-persistence-matters/

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smallfries
"EC2 is like the volatile RAM in your laptop" I can reboot an instance with no
data loss, not like ram

"If you use Elastic Block Store (EBS), that helps as it provides persistent
storage, but the instance itself is still ephemeral. That means although EBS
data can survive an instance failure, the server, its configuration, log data
for troubleshooting, completed work that has not been offloaded, etc. is all
lost."

ln -s /ebsmnt/log /var - onliner boyeeeeee!

"You need to do things like monitor for instance failure, dynamically rebuild
and reconfigure new instances on the fly, ensure data you don’t want to lose
is always replicated or on EBS, be able to rollback and recover from lost work
when an instance fails, etc."

I would do these anyway. On EC2,Mosso,Colo, Rolling Solo, etc.

"That means if a cloud sever fails, the problem is fixed and your cloud server
is brought back online."

huh? "the problem is fixed"

Terrible article, scare tactics 101.

What's your perception of the technical IQ of the readers on here ? Pretty
offensive.

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spchampion
My technical IQ is pretty high, and this article is spot-on for me.
Persistence is a huge concern for me, and EC2 just doesn't offer anything
close to what Rackspace can.

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kierank
I'm not sure how they can have video transcoding as a use-case when their only
variables are RAM and storage space. There's no CPU speed variation or the
ability to access more cores; you are just stuck with what happens to be
available on the server at the time. Gogrid are the same.

Unfortunately my experience with cloud VM providers is that quite a few of
them are all talk, no action. Having said that some have been transparent
about what you get and how much it will cost; EC2, Flexiscale and Elastichosts
to name a few.

~~~
wmf
They have "Fair-weighted Quad Core processors (Guaranteed minimum. Weighting
scales up with memory)", so larger VMs should have higher minimum CPU
performance.

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wvl
One thing I didn't understand before playing with Mosso Cloud Servers, is that
a "cloud server" is basically a VPS that prices bandwidth incrementally and
allows fractional billing cycles. If you shut down your Mosso cloud server,
you are still getting billed at the same per hour rate as when it is running.
You have to delete your server configuration before the billing stops.

