Amazon Elastic Cloud
I took a brief look at Amazon’s EC2 info about a year ago, but my interest in it (and cloud computing in general) has been growing. Last night I read through a lot of the EC2 documentation/tutorials and stood up an instance. I’m sure my thoughts will gel more as I continue learning and experimenting. Here is my quick brain dump:
pros
- very simple to use
- inexpensive – I experimented for less than $1
- ability to stand up many instances quickly
cons
- internet latency if interfacing between EC2 and machines in your own data center (not Amazon’s fault, it is just physics)
- can’t take advantage of non-generic capabilities like SSDs (seems like lots of technologies are growing up around using SSDs as 2nd level caches)
- load balancing options seem meager
So far I think there are some architectures that are perfect for EC2′s model, some that aren’t great, and many options where you mix some of your own gear with EC2 providing a few or a lot of resources where it makes sense.
Update: I had a few questions from friends and co-workers asking for clarification and where EC2 might fit for them.
Q: Do I pay depending on how much CPU or disk space I am using?
A: You pay per hour for each instance youn have booted, regardless of if it is idle all the time or running maxed out. Your hourly charge depends on the size of the instance (in CPU and RAM terms and potentially the OS and applications ). There is some local disk space you can use for free but it doesn’t persist across instance reboots and isn’t necessarily fast. If you want persistent storage on EC2 you should look into using S3 (object based storage) or Elastic Block Store (EBS) which gives you a raw volume between 1GB and 1TB that you can create a file system on.
Q: Is it worth using EC2 for web hosting?
A: If you want to do some generic web hosting (and typical small uses of MySQL or servlets, etc), I think you are likely better off using one of the many hosting companies where you can do it much cheaper and easier. I think EC2 is most useful when you want to have great flexibility in how OS instances are configured and how many instances you want running at a given time.