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The Lowdown on Amazon EC2 ‘Elastic Compute Cloud’
Posted in: Blog by CodersCode on January 31, 2011
With Cloud Computing now hitting the mainstream, Amazon is grasping the opportunity to roll out some seriously impressive cloud-based solutions.
Our interest in Amazon EC2 was motivated by a desire to:
- Virtually eliminate the impact of single hardware failure by using cloud resource
- Reduce substantially the cost of hardware maintenance, replacement, upgrade and parts
- Provide a 99.95%+ service availability for clients
- Focus on core business services rather than hardware maintenance
- Achieve a scalable solution to grow projects and services as and when demand increases
The sleepless nights taken rebuilding servers, restoring backups and fingernail-chewing as we analysed servers are now gone – Amazon EC2 techies take care of that. So, we have achieved a hands-free hosting infrastructure with international deployment capability.
So, it works… but here are some tips for those tackling these challenges which we hope will help you get through to the ‘promised land’ detailed above.
1 Year Free? – Good for a Trial Run
If you want to get your hands dirty, then go for the 1 year free account which is enough to give it a real thorough test. You only get the basic Linux, and only 600Mb RAM – but, it really is catch-free ‘FREE’. Watch your usage though, we went slighly over and were charged 1c a MB for data transfer.
Ready to Spend? Then Use for Live and Not Testing
We only use our EC2 cloud for hosting our live applications and websites as the costs can rack up very quickly, particularly when reinstalling sites. For us, the best move we made was to use our left-over servers (which were ditched in favour of EC2) to create an internal development base. Perfect re-use of resources!
The Benefits of Amazon EC2
Based on our experiences, you get:
- No hardware maintenance or failure headaches
- Lower entry costs for high-performance hosting
- Virtual server is ready in minutes
- Hosted applications within half a day
- Time to market, and deployment of updates, is reduced substantially
- Scalability is outstanding, you pay for what you need
- You can safely stop instances, and not be charged during that time
This solution is particularly good for start-up sites where the volume of traffic is unpredictable.
The Risks of Amazon EC2
- It is substantially more expensive than traditional VPS Hosting
- Costs can rise very quickly as they charge for data transfer and per request
- Data saved in instances will be lost when it is stopped (you can fix this by buying some data storage space on the Elastic Block Store or Amazon S3)
- Your data and website security is based on trusting Amazon’s security effectiveness
Overall, we think that EC2 and EC2-type hosting is the way forward for medium and high traffic websites, or high-ticket global websites needing greater performance. If you’d like to consider an EC2 solution, then call CodersCode on 0845 095 6933 or send in an email.