

Werner Vogels on Amazon EC2's new persistent storage feature - RyanGWU82
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/04/persistent_storage_for_amazon.html

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joao
"We are talking about this service at this early stage because we believe this
will help many of our EC2 customers with setting their development priorities
for this year."

translation: "Contrary to what we usually do, we decided to announce this
still under development features so Google App Engine doesn't continue to
steal headlines, or any future clients choosing a platform, from us - you know
how the press loves to champion Google innovation."

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meat-eater
This new feature addresses what I think is the biggest complaint about EC2, as
seen on their discussion boards. People used to complain about the lack of
static IPs, now that's no longer a problem. Once they get around to rolling
out this feature to the public, the only legit complaint that people would
have for them is the base cost when starting out.

When your traffic is zero or very low, as in the case of when you're just
starting out, a conventional VPS host is still a lot cheaper. But the good
thing with AWS is that it's easy to port your apps to run on their platform.

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wanorris
"But the good thing with AWS is that it's easy to port your apps to run on
their platform."

Once you have mountable volumes, you can pretty much run the LAMP-style stack
of your choice unmodified, right?

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LogicHoleFlaw
Pretty much. You essentially get your persistent read-write /var filesystem.
You can keep the read-only parts of your system in your boot image. Unix has a
long heritage of working in such an environment. It's a natural fit.

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ardit33
That's pretty awesome. I think Amazon is doing the right thing, and keeping
things open, unlike Google's closed system. I have been trying it out, and I
don't like the idea of building an app so closeley tied to one vendor.

The only thing that Amazon needs is a good online system for managing their
offerings. I guess scaler and rightscale try to solve this problem, but amazon
could provide some better system managing themselves.

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siculars
this is yet another step in the right direction. amazon is clearly listening
to their target consumers. can't wait to try it out.

