

Here is the biggest mistake you will make on Amazon EC2…  - edukatr
http://www.edukatr.com/here-is-the-biggest-mistake-you-will-make-on-amazon-ec2/

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ehutch79
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the point of ec2 style clouds was to
create an ami with everything configured just how you need it ahead of time,
and boot lots of small machines off that. The data should be fed from s3 or
from rds or from an ec2 instance with a database which stores it's data on an
ebs.

The main idea is that it's an easy platform to scale horizontally from.

It never really struck me as intended to be a service which you run something
like wordpress from...

What this guy probably wanted was something like rackspace and linode offer,
which is a vm with a persistant disk, more in line with vmware on the desktop
or esx, or xen, than amazons offering.

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kennu
I agree, I think your development process on EC2 needs a strategy on how to
regularly build new AMI images. Probably a mix of updating some things in-
place while running, and sometimes creating a new baseline AMI image of your
whole OS and app, which is then used on the next reboot.

Also I would store all dynamic data on RDS (database) and S3 (uploaded files),
probably no need for EBS in most web apps.

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petercooper
Is it "picking an instance too small to handle the traffic HN sends"?

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jedsmith
I always picture the submit-and-boom scenario as skeet shooting, which keeps
me amused enough until someone pastes a cache link into a comment.

Pull! _Pow_

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alanpca
Be careful who you take advice from. I can't believe somebody who is providing
information on setting up EC2 for startups was not using elastic block storage
for their critical data.

There is really no excuse for this. Don't make the same mistake.

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bmelton
Yeah -- if I'm understanding that article correctly, he really had no business
offering up advice on how to configure EC2 instances.

On the upside, the title is decidedly not link-bait. That really is the
biggest mistake you can make on AWS.

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ronnier
My cache got it:
[http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.edukatr.com/here-...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.edukatr.com/here-
is-the-biggest-mistake-you-will-make-on-amazon-ec2/)

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andrewstuart
You might consider multiple backup strategies, different types of backups done
in completely different ways, none with any level of dependence on each other.
Test them to see if you are able to restore from them.

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forensic
Amazon pretty much provides that service for you. You just gotta turn it on.

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simonw
If your only backups are on AWS, you better hope that your credit card doesn't
start bouncing while you're on a week long vacation.

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bmelton
I'm not entirely sure I see what he did wrong -- he says he was using 'block
storage', but his remedy was to get an EBS volume?

Was he really running the contents of two websites on the EC2 instance?

I mean, I've done that. Once. When I was first playing with EC2, and well
before I'd actually deployed a live and (apparently) valuable site to it.

If I'm understanding the problem correctly, then my sympathies. I don't know
if it's a curse or a blessing that it went all this time without having
rebooted and destroying everything before now. I suppose that's the sort of
thing you'd prefer to learn earlier than later.

~~~
jeffbarr
> Was he really running the contents of two websites on the EC2 instance?

Apparently so, despite the fact that all of the EC2 documentation labels the
local disk as "ephemeral."

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lwat
Site is down. Is it hosted on EC2?

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dryicerx
Site's IP points EC2... While the site is down, google cache to the rescue:
<http://tinyurl.com/4o2psun>

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edukatr
Thanks guys for pointing this

