
Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - persistent storage  - tortilla
http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_c_0_201590011_1?ie=UTF8&node=689343011&no=201590011
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EastSmith
"I/O requests cost $0.10 per million" :) I wonder what is the amount MySql
generates? Any data?

Edit, as I found this (<http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/08/20/amazon-ebs-
explained/>): "As a point of reference, our main database server is pretty
busy and chugs along at an average of 17 transactions per second, which should
total to around $4.40 per month. But our monitoring servers, prior to some
recent optimizations, hammered the disks as fast as they would go at over 1000
random writes per second sustained 24×7. That would end up costing over $250
per month! As far as I can tell, for most situations the EBS transaction costs
will be in the noise, but you can make it expensive if you’re not careful."

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mseebach
> But our monitoring servers, prior to some recent optimizations, hammered the
> disks as fast as they would go at over 1000 random writes per second
> sustained 24×7.

I don't know what that monitoring thing does, but if you make it hammer your
non-persistent local storage, and then sync logs to S3, you should be fine.

As I understand this service, it's only for transactional stuff that
absolutely need to be there after a reboot (e.g. transactional DB), if the
plug is pulled accidentially.

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dabeeeenster
This is the final piece of the puzzle, following on from persistent IP
addresses, in terms of using EC2 as a web server platform.

Time to get tinkering!

A shame Amazon dont have a data centre in Europe for European firms, in terms
of reducing latency...

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ovi256
They do have an S3 datacenter in Europe. Source: aws.amazon.com/s3

Could be mighty useful as a CDN.

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falsestprophet
It is useful as a media server, but a CDN is a lot more.

"CDN nodes are deployed in multiple locations, often over multiple backbones.
These nodes cooperate with each other to satisfy requests for content by end
users, transparently moving content to optimize the delivery process.
Optimization can take the form of reducing bandwidth costs, improving end-user
performance, or increasing global availability of content.

The number of nodes and servers making up a CDN varies, depending on the
architecture, some reaching thousands of nodes with tens of thousands of
servers.

Requests for content are algorithmically directed to nodes that are optimal in
some way. When optimizing for performance, locations that are best for serving
content to the user may be chosen. This may be measured by choosing locations
that are the fewest hops or fewest number of network seconds away from the
requesting client, so as to optimize delivery across local networks. When
optimizing for cost, locations that are least expensive may be chosen instead.
Often these two goals tend to align, as servers that are close to the end user
sometimes have an advantage in serving costs, perhaps because they are located
within the same network as the end user. However the value of a CDN is often
demonstrated when these two goals do not align i.e. when the best performing
servers and network route is located in the furthest geographic distance."

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maximilian
This isn't new, but was in beta for a while right? Is this now out of beta for
use by us layfolk?

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cperciva
I think Amazon was calling it a private "alpha" rather than a "beta"; but
aside from that, yes on both points.

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patrickg-zill
"The durability of your volume depends both on the size of your volume and the
percentage of the data that has changed since your last snapshot. As an
example, volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their
most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of
between 0.1% - 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume.
This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR
of around 4%, making EBS volumes 10 times more reliable than typical commodity
disk drives."

Sorry, this is unacceptable.

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khangtoh
why is this unacceptable? you do realized that there is no 0% failure storage
in existence

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patrickg-zill
I realize there is no 0% failure, 100% guaranteed storage.

However, saying "yep, your storage space is now dead and you have lost all
your files stored there" is not something I feel comfortable with. Why not
offer something more resilient?

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Tichy
Because it would get more expensive?

Probably you could combine several of these "drives" for more resilience?

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johnrob
This could be leveraged into a much cheaper (albeit less reliable) version of
simple queue service. You can have multiple EC2 instances feeding off of the
same disk used as a central repository.

In general, EBS is making me think creatively about how to better architect
distributed systems. SQS was both expensive and somewhat limited in scope. But
now that I get disks in common, there's no restriction as to how I might
partition work among EC2s.

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rapind
SQS got a lot cheaper, I think around Feb this year. Are you sure you aren't
going by the old prices? I find it very affordable now.

$0.01 per 10,000 requests $0.100 per GB in $0.170 per GB out (less with higher
volume).

I can't remember exactly, but I think it was only a per request cost before of
around $0.10 per 1,000 or something.

Also the in/out costs don't apply when they're coming from EC2, which would be
the case in your scenario I believe. So from EC2 if you're doing an EC2 based
distributed system, you're looking at one dollar per million requests (so for
processing a message in a distributed system typically one dollar per 500,000
messages pushed then pulled).

Pretty cheap by my standards. Much cheaper than it was at initial launch.

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geuis
been waiting for this. Woo boy, EC2 just got shiny again!

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maximilian
I've actually been racking my brain trying to come up with excuses to try it
out and use it for something. I haven't come up with too much yet, but it
seems pretty cool.

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goodkarma
I'd really like to use AWS for future Rails deployments.. Has anyone gotten a
Rails app deployed using EC2/EBS/S3?

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kehunt
I've run <http://Dibs.net> on EC2 for over a year, with images served up on
S3. Several servers have uptimes since I booted them in June '07. I have
nothing but good things to say about my experience with AWS.

If you can, I highly recommend going to the AWS Start Up Tour
(<http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/2008-aws-start.html>) It's a good place
to meet people and last year Jeff Bezos and John Doerr showed up to the one in
Palo Alto.

Edit: Forgot to mention - I run PostgreSQL on instance storage with log
shipping and backups to S3, and a couple of MySQL DBs for Cacti and
geolocation lookups. EBS will help a lot in this area, which is kind of a pain
right now. Can't wait to start using it.

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goodkarma
I've tried various gems and plugins and kept having issues, eventually giving
up on AWS (that was several months ago).

Can you offer any tips or suggestions for a successful rails deployment?

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khangtoh
I officially announce ;) this acronym for EC2+EBS so we can just say ECBS
whenever we talked about EC2 with EBS.

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trezor
_so we can just say ECBS_

This might reflect what I think of the whole cloud-hype, but I read that as
"Easy BS". Maybe not the name you want coined for something which is supposed
to be good, not shit ;)

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LogicHoleFlaw
Easy Bulletproof Serving

