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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 ha

by singlow 16y 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 16y ago
You set those scripts up yourself though so AWS is not automatically providing it. AWS does make it easy and cheap though.
- singlow 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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...
- singlow 16y ago
  Automatic failover is not directly in the AWS tools, but its fairly simple with some bash scripts and their aut0-scaling features. My setup just involves an autoscaling pool of web front ends connected to a mysql instance in the back and two micro instances running gluster. Migrating to another zone involves promoting a mysql slave in another zone, creating a new web front end pool and spinning up the gluster instances. This is all in scripts I wrote. But having those redundancies available on demand at no cost when they are not used is very handy. I do have a linode for some other projects and I may rather have this site on linode. I am not sure about having linodes spinning up and down on-demand when traffic spikes. Do they support hourly charges for short term use like this? My primary problem at linode is getting lots of storage space. In one of my linode sites I have an s3 bucket mounted over fuse in write only mode and redirect requests for them to the s3 url. This works well in limited circumstances. Real redundant hardware may not be more complicated, just more expensive. I do that too.

by singlow 16y ago

abraham 16y ago

You set those scripts up yourself though so AWS is not automatically providing it. AWS does make it easy and cheap though.

singlow 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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...

singlow 16y ago
Automatic failover is not directly in the AWS tools, but its fairly simple with some bash scripts and their aut0-scaling features. My setup just involves an autoscaling pool of web front ends connected to a mysql instance in the back and two micro instances running gluster. Migrating to another zone involves promoting a mysql slave in another zone, creating a new web front end pool and spinning up the gluster instances. This is all in scripts I wrote. But having those redundancies available on demand at no cost when they are not used is very handy. I do have a linode for some other projects and I may rather have this site on linode. I am not sure about having linodes spinning up and down on-demand when traffic spikes. Do they support hourly charges for short term use like this? My primary problem at linode is getting lots of storage space. In one of my linode sites I have an s3 bucket mounted over fuse in write only mode and redirect requests for them to the s3 url. This works well in limited circumstances. Real redundant hardware may not be more complicated, just more expensive. I do that too.