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Why do people think being in the "cloud" for hosting changes any of these rules? EC2 is a rentable compute utility, it doesn't provide for automatic failure or

Why do people think being in the "cloud" for hosting changes any of these rules? EC2 is a rentable compute utility, it doesn't provide for automatic failure or redundancy. Also people keep talking about an EC2 outage but it is really 1 region and from the status updates, maybe only a single Availability Zone that is affected. That said, maybe I'm just less upset because my site is in a US-East Zone that doesn't appear to be affected.

jbigelow 15y ago
"EC2 is a rentable compute utility, it doesn't provide for automatic failure or redundancy." Nobody wants to admit that "cloud" became a great way to market (and mark up) traditional web hosting services that we've had since the early 90s. It still boggles my mind that Microsoft's Azure, which overall I'm a fan of, makes me pick an instance size (and corresponding price) for my app; the original premise of the cloud was to take these kinds decisions out of the mix. What happens when my micro-instance pegs out? It won't automatically bump up to the next higher level or spin up a new instance for me. This isn't "cloud" this is marketing.
- tybris 15y ago
  The difference is in the word "utility". In the 90s, hosting was a fixed quantity for a fixed price. In the 00/10s, hosting is whatever you need whenever you need it and pay for whatever you use. It's like going from chopped wood to an electric grid, a radical transformation of technology and business models.
  - mtogo 15y ago
    A radical transformation, really? To me it seems more like a small step, just changing the payment model a little bit and making it a bit more convenient to provision more instances.
singlow 15y ago
Actually, EC2 and AWS in general does give a lot of options for automatic failure and redundancy. I have a highly available application running in EC2 and I have multiple instances ready for failover and scripts triggered by monitors to move into another zone if the whole zone goes bonkers. This would be much more expensive and complicated if I needed to have dedicated redundant hardware in two geographically separated datacenters.
- abraham 15y ago
  You set those scripts up yourself though so AWS is not automatically providing it. AWS does make it easy and cheap though.
  - singlow 15y ago
    A lot of it is actually just configuration of their auto-scaling mechanism. If a web front end stops working it starts new instances according to the pool minimums and CPU load. There are some custom scripts though, mostly for migrating data to another zone.
- champion 15y ago
  I think you're right in the sense that they make it easy to have compute units in different geographic/availability zones, which they make much easier/cheaper than doing yourself. But it isn't something built-in with regard to fail-over handling, etc.
- chubot 15y ago
  I'd be interested to see some details on your setup. How would it be more complicated with redundant hardware? Also, it might not be more expensive if you use something like Linode. Linode is not supposed to be "cloud" AFAIK -- those VMs sit on a single "statically allocated" box. AWS is supposed to be "cloud" in the sense that VMs can migrate between physical machines automatically. I am searching for "aws automatic failover", but some sites seem to be down, probably due to the AWS outage :) http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-automated-single-server-failover-solution-on-AWS http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-automated-single-serve...

jbigelow 15y ago

"EC2 is a rentable compute utility, it doesn't provide for automatic failure or redundancy." Nobody wants to admit that "cloud" became a great way to market (and mark up) traditional web hosting services that we've had since the early 90s. It still boggles my mind that Microsoft's Azure, which overall I'm a fan of, makes me pick an instance size (and corresponding price) for my app; the original premise of the cloud was to take these kinds decisions out of the mix. What happens when my micro-instance pegs out? It won't automatically bump up to the next higher level or spin up a new instance for me. This isn't "cloud" this is marketing.

tybris 15y ago
The difference is in the word "utility". In the 90s, hosting was a fixed quantity for a fixed price. In the 00/10s, hosting is whatever you need whenever you need it and pay for whatever you use. It's like going from chopped wood to an electric grid, a radical transformation of technology and business models.
- mtogo 15y ago
  A radical transformation, really? To me it seems more like a small step, just changing the payment model a little bit and making it a bit more convenient to provision more instances.

singlow 15y ago

Actually, EC2 and AWS in general does give a lot of options for automatic failure and redundancy. I have a highly available application running in EC2 and I have multiple instances ready for failover and scripts triggered by monitors to move into another zone if the whole zone goes bonkers. This would be much more expensive and complicated if I needed to have dedicated redundant hardware in two geographically separated datacenters.

abraham 15y ago
You set those scripts up yourself though so AWS is not automatically providing it. AWS does make it easy and cheap though.
- singlow 15y ago
  A lot of it is actually just configuration of their auto-scaling mechanism. If a web front end stops working it starts new instances according to the pool minimums and CPU load. There are some custom scripts though, mostly for migrating data to another zone.
champion 15y ago
I think you're right in the sense that they make it easy to have compute units in different geographic/availability zones, which they make much easier/cheaper than doing yourself. But it isn't something built-in with regard to fail-over handling, etc.
chubot 15y ago
I'd be interested to see some details on your setup. How would it be more complicated with redundant hardware? Also, it might not be more expensive if you use something like Linode. Linode is not supposed to be "cloud" AFAIK -- those VMs sit on a single "statically allocated" box. AWS is supposed to be "cloud" in the sense that VMs can migrate between physical machines automatically. I am searching for "aws automatic failover", but some sites seem to be down, probably due to the AWS outage :) http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-automated-single-server-failover-solution-on-AWS http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-automated-single-serve...