
Anybody using Amazon Web Services (S3, EC2) in their startup? - mattculbreth
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Use-AWS%3F-home-page/b/ref=sc_fe_l_1/103-1678423-5846208?ie=UTF8&node=15763371&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA
======
mattjaynes
AWS is truly amazing.

I'm currently developing an open-source framework that allows theoretically
infinite scalability utilizing round-robin dns, S3, EC2, S3DFS (allows
mounting an S3 bucket as a local file system on multiple EC2 instances),
SQLite (serverless embeddable database where each db is just a flat file).

S3DFS works at the block level and has read/write caching so is really fast.
However, it requires a commercial license for non-personal use.

SQLite is amazing in it's power and simplicity. It will start to have issues
on a high-traffic website, but I'm breaking each user into their own db file.
That sounds really bad - but SQLite has a great feature that allows you to
attach multiple databases together and run queries across them as if it's just
one database (handy for site-wide stats, search indexing, etc). Also, since
the db's are just flat-files - backing up is super-easy with tar gzip!

I'm using PHP for the coding, but anticipate other languages libraries to be
built to use the system as well.

Help is welcome, just let me know if you're interested!

I was thinking of calling it infinizon - but that sounds kinda dorky -
thoughts?

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

<http://www.openfount.com/blog/s3dfs-for-ec2>

Update: I just came across <http://rightscale.com> which is an amazing AWS
console that allows you to control almost all aspects of EC2, S3, and SQS. Too
many features to list here, but definitely a must see. I've been playing
around with it and it works great.

------
pg
Practically all the current batch of YC startups are using S3.

------
jganetsk
Just so everyone is aware, S3 guarantees only 4 nines of relability (99.99%
uptime), not 5 nines.

5 nines means the service is down, on average, 5 minutes out of a year.

4 nines would be almost an hour.

That's still pretty damn good.

------
nickb
I love S3! It's so easy to get started. I have less use for EC2 since I have
less computations to do. I wish I could run a database on EC2...

~~~
inklesspen
You can't run a database?

What's the point of this, then:
[http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry!default.jspa?categoryID=101&externalID;=519&fromSearchPage;=true](http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry!default.jspa?categoryID=101&externalID=519&fromSearchPage=true)

~~~
nickb
This past week I listened in on Werner Vogels' ETech 2007 speech and he said,
explicitly, that EC2 is not suitable for high performance, large scale,
databases. My database is more than 10Gb in size. You can't have that large
image on EC2. I guess you could get away by hosting some tables there that:

a) don't take up much space,

b) don't change much and

c) don't have to have the latest data.

~~~
inklesspen
"Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz
x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network
bandwidth."

I'm not seeing where you can't host that DB on EC2. It might not be the
optimal platform, but my guess is that EC2 will do a pretty good job for the
money.

~~~
igrigorik
1) The data is not persistent -- meaning, if your server dies, you loose your
database with it. Rebooting the server gives you a clean slate.

This theoretically can be addressed with a complex backup/redundancy model,
but frankly, it's not worth the trouble. Alternatively, you can use a
distributed filesystem based on S3, but the performance will be poor. Long
story short, your database is your bread and butter, and EC2 simply can't
provide the basic services required to run a DB efficiently.

2) Dynamic DNS. Extra headaches, simply not worth it.

EC2 was not designed for persistent data storage, it's a compute cloud.

~~~
gojomo
Re: "rebooting the server gives you a clean state"

That's not quite true: the HD contents survive crashes and reboots. Only if
you release the node (or lose it otherwise -- it's not guaranteed to stay with
you), the HD contents are lost.

I suspect lots of startups are finding it "stable enough", and the
backup/redundancy planning needed manageable.

~~~
igrigorik
Are you certain? This must be new, because before your would get a fresh
machine every time. Anytime you boot, AMZ looks at the image you want to run,
and they unpack and uninstall it for you, meaning that even a reboot led to a
clean drive. Now, there's been some talk about 'shadow copies' where you might
even get access to other customers data by simply starting a deep scan on the
drive.. but that's hardly persistence.

~~~
gojomo
Yes. Of course, you lose the HD contents if you release the instance, or for
other occasional failure and system events.

------
mattculbreth
This is just another cool thing happening to reduce the cost of new software
apps. Salesforce.com has the same thing with Apex. The only bad thing there is
that they tie you a bit too much to their technologies (Java/Oracle). They
have adapters for other platforms but it still runs on Java/Oracle.

------
onetimeliner
Using it on <http://onetimeline.com> \- EC2 for indexing nodes and web front
end, s3 for data storage and awsp for webcrawler. Couldn't have got up this
fast without it - 1.5 years in the making (well fast to develop a search
engine anyways!)

------
binarybana
I know that YouOS uses it.

------
brett
I've used S3 on a few projects and would definitely endorse it. I just got
accepted to the EC2 beta last week and haven't started messing around with it.

------
mattculbreth
This seems like the coolest thing since sliced bread. We're experimenting with
S3 but I'm really interested in EC2 also. Anybody else using AWS?

~~~
zach
Sure, if you're using Rails it's really easy to use attachment_fu (the new
generation of the image/file storing acts_as_attachment plugin) to keep
uploaded photos on S3. Also for Rails, Jamglue's technique of putting your
entire static file hierarchy on S3 is great for maximimizing your app servers'
bandwidth. BTW, Justin.tv runs off EC2 servers.

------
comforteagle
Sure are. We're melding ec2 instances to s3 as an actual filesystem.

-Steve fooworks.com 

