

Amazon EC2 gets static IPs. - ptm
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/ann.jspa?annID=295

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SwellJoe
It's about damned time. They've been trying to pretend EC2 is for utility
computing...like running large distributed apps for a short period of time.
But nobody is using it for that...people want Amazon's network and a cheap way
to scale from zero to huge for websites. Now that they've finally embraced
that, if they'll just resolve the reliability issues, EC2 will be a fantastic
hosting option.

~~~
gibsonf1
We've been running 24/7 on EC2/S3 for months now with no downtime - 0 bad
experiences so far.

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ptm
I too have instances run for 5-6 months without downtime.

The reliabilty concerns are overstated. As long as one accounts for the lack
of persistent storage, there should not be a problem.

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kirubakaran
Though I am a happy user too, we are worried about a huge Black Swan scenario.

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davidw
Heh, thinking of exactly that, I was going to write about how turkeys are fed
and well taken care of by humans for 99% of their lives, until that last day,
when things take a turn for the worse.

That said, things will run just fine, even with downtime, if you're not
depending on the machine in any way, don't have _any_ local storage, and are
capable of switching over to other systems. However the lack of downtime might
lull people into not worrying about that stuff.

~~~
sabat
You raise an important concern, but I wonder if the analogy is the right one.
For a lot of startups/businesses, a period of downtime (in hours, not days) is
not death. It might suck, but you won't die. In the late '90s, Ebay was down
for three days straight (!) and it's still doing OK.

I will be surprised if Amazon doesn't work out the reliability issues anyway,
given the massive resources and smart people it has available to it.

~~~
davidw
A bit of downtime is certainly not a catastrophe, but it might turn into one
if you lose a bunch of data because you weren't properly shipping it
elsewhere.

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pchristensen
A much more sane response to the overwrought fears of EC2 downtime. If you
don't know your hourly/daily income rate (often $0), then you can't even
correctly value uptime.

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jeremiah
Thats just it. Downtime is expensive if you rely on your web site to make you
money. If you are a small eCommerce shop with all your eggs in the EC2 basket,
downtime can be expensive.

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kirubakaran
Does this mean emails sent from EC2 will not be automatically marked as spam?
(right now I think Hotmail marks all EC2 emails as spam). I read that reverse
DNS and PTR records are needed to accomplish this. So, this solves just half
the problem?

I am asking these as exploratory questions... I don't really have a good grasp
on what I am talking about. Please point me to resources.

BTW, do you know of any sample Python code that is used to act on incoming
emails in the server?

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SwellJoe
Amazon probably provides PTR records for all of their IPs. You can check with
the host command on Linux:

host 10.1.1.1

You'll also want an SPF record for your zone:

<http://www.openspf.org/>

DomainKeys are being checked by some webmail providers, but it's only a non-
spammy characteristic at this point, not mandatory for delivery. As long as
nothing else about your message is stupid (e.g. RFC compliant SMTP server,
reasonable DNS records, and you aren't sending 100 per minute to addresses in
the same domain), it'll go through.

I'd suggest using whatever Python library will allow you to send using a real
SMTP server (or just pipe your email into the mail or sendmail command, which
use the local smtpd to send, by default), like Postfix or Sendmail. There may
be a standalone library that is actually RFC compliant and handles error
conditions properly, but it seems unlikely from a historical standpoint (most
such libraries, particularly in the PHP world, are renowned for epic failure).
As long as Postfix or Sendmail are configured properly, your mail will be RFC-
compliant and will look far less spammy than those coming from a half-assed
implementation of the spec.

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kirubakaran
Great! Thanks.

Can you please point me to some how-to about acting on incoming email using
Python? I look far and wide but couldn't find much.

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SwellJoe
I have no idea. I haven't worked with Python in several years. But, I know
that both Mailman and Trac are written in Python and they both do stuff with
incoming mail...so, there's certainly some python code out their for dealing
with incoming mail. That's where I'd start my search if I were in your shoes.

~~~
kirubakaran
Thanks.

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liquidcool
I was speaking with an Amazon WS evangelist last year and he was recommending
a 5 server system: load balancer, two web/app servers and two DB servers.

The issue I brought up was that you couldn't guarantee colocation, so you
might be making DB calls cross-country. If you're using a poorly optimized ORM
(untweaked ActiveRecord, Hibernate, etc.), that is issuing tons of queries,
the net lag between the app server and the DB could slow you to a crawl.

The availability zones seem like the could be an answer to that, but they're
being marketed as an answer to disaster recovery and failover. It would
definitely be nice to request your app server and DB server are close to each
other.

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trigger
Great to see this development but won't they need a huge block of IP addresses
to support this?

~~~
wmf
So? They'll just pass the cost on to customers.

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vegai
Perhaps this is just a coincidence, but interesting nevertheless.

This story was submitted to reddit at least two times: the original submission
was downmodded to zero (or less), a resubmit eventually to 1. Here, it's at 51
points.

I suppose what I want to say is

127.0.0.1 reddit.com programming.reddit.com

~~~
cstejerean
interesting. OTOH we all know how much reddit sucks and any further comments
on the topic are just adding to the noise here.

~~~
vegai
Old habits die hard. My apologies.

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robmnl
This is amazing. I am in the process of deploying my webapp, and was
considering slicehost due to the static ip's issue.

Then I took another look on the aws pages, and, hooray: elastic ip's were
introduced yesterday!

~~~
sabat
Amazon's pricing compares favorably with slicehost's?

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jmtulloss
Depends on your bandwidth requirements. For somebody without traffic,
absolutely not. Slicehost blows them away. That's why I use Slicehost:).

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zkinion
Yeah, I was going to use it for my online gambling (legal) site, and found the
dynamic IP problem to be the real decision maker for me. I use smartfox server
as a socket server, and renewing a license with a new ip address takes 24 to
48 hours, which means death to an online gaming site using social networking.

The static IPs make it possible to use AWS now. I can finally add voice chat
functionality because of the power behind the large and extra large instances.

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PStamatiou
so is it much easier to use EC2 as a server now that IPs don't change? IE, you
don't need dyndns and/or a load balancer? I wouldn't mind hosting a site of
mine on there..

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rapind
Great news

