

Storage Space, The Final Frontier: Amazon EC2 adds persistent disks - RyanGWU82
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/04/block-to-the-fu.html

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PStamatiou
absolute first thought that popped in my head: holy shit.

second thought: the oreilly ec2 book i bought is now double outdated. first it
was elastic IP/availability zones, now this.

edit: rightscale tested it out first-hand.. here are the thoughts from a
developer's POV [http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/04/13/amazon-takes-ec2-to-
th...](http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/04/13/amazon-takes-ec2-to-the-next-
level-with-persistent-storage-volumes/)

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listic
Do you mean this one? "Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and
SimpleDB"(<http://tinyurl.com/57gfot>) Would you still recommend the book?

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PStamatiou
oh yeah it's a great book, the parts I've skimmed over so far.

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ryanmahoski
I skimmed it too and think PAWS is a tight dev guide for what author Murty
calls AWS' "infrastructure services" (read: no Mturk, DevPay, Fulfillment,
Associates or Alexa). The 600 pg book celebrates Ruby and the free download is
particularly well commented in Python, Java.

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smhinsey
I think this has the potential to be pretty huge. EC2 is becoming almost the
ideal disaster recovery environment for us. All it would take is a simple
bridge between our internal messaging platform and SQS and there we go.

This is an incredibly powerful paradigm even without persistent storage, and
now with the addition of persistent storage, serving numerous small files just
became much simpler than in the S3-only world.

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reitzensteinm
I wonder how long it takes to back up a running virtual machine of, say, 2gb
of ram and 10gb disk? At 1gb ethernet that would be over a minute best case,
and the VM image would (presumbly?) have to stall while the copy takes place.
So unfortunately running a single machine and doing hourly backups would
probably be impossible, which is a shame - that would be amazing.

Great news, though!

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smhinsey
this doesn't really have anything to do with backing up ram or necessarily the
instance's main disks - it's a volume you can mount and format to your taste,
and this volume is now available to multiple instances and can be snapshotted
into S3 on-demand.

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LogicHoleFlaw
The way the article describes it it's basically made available as a linux
block storage device - you could set up software raid or access it as a raw
device without a filesystem. Very nifty. I wonder how it plays with ZFS.

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papersmith
Holy crap, now I have no reason not to use EC2.

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nradov
This looks pretty cool. It's a shame we'll never be able to use it due
concerns over HIPAA privacy regulations.

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kirubakaran
Amazon is enabling startups to be Google killers.

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listic
This makes me think: Now I really want to use this! Can anyone recommend a way
to learn using AWS? Is there a useful book? Do I have to learn Ruby first?

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inovica
Maybe visit their site? There's a book mentioned above also. Its platform
independent (kind of) so you can use PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby........

