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The ugly caveat isn't VPC, it's EBS. This lands on the wrong side of pets-versus-cattle. AWS has been moving towards giving people what they want, but it's sti

by alrs 12y ago

The ugly caveat isn't VPC, it's EBS. This lands on the wrong side of pets-versus-cattle. AWS has been moving towards giving people what they want, but it's still best practice to use ephemeral storage and architect accordingly.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
> but it's still best practice to use ephemeral storage and architect accordingly Its not worth the engineer time. Use EBS volumes, clean them up when they're no longer in use after termination. The only time you need local/ephemeral storage is swap or scratch space, or throughput you can't get from general or provisioned EBS. Plus, you get auto recovery now without having to have architected for it ;)
- gtaylor 12y ago
  After I say this, they'll probably have a huge EBS-caused outage, but it feels like EBS is much more capable now than it was even a year or two ago. The General Purpose SSDs and the Provisioned IOPS have more than handled our performance concerns. Since that last awful multi-AZ outage a year or two ago, there hasn't been much to deal with for us.
- gst 12y ago
  EBS is great if it works for requirements, but unfortunately the maximum size of an EBS volume is limited to only 1 TB. With SSD instance storage you can get up to 6.4 TB.
  - Rapzid 12y ago
    Fortunately AWS is releasing 16TB volumes in the near future :)
Rapzid 12y ago
Here is a fun story. Amazon's RDS services are backed by EBS. They also restart the instances automatically if they encounter issues. But sure, "Best PracticesTM".
- alrs 12y ago
  You're right, RDS is backed by EBS.
dice 12y ago
If you've drunk the pets-vs-cattle koolaid to the point where your instances are all (or mostly) ephermal then you're probably also using auto-scaling groups and don't care if a particular single instance falls over.
- peteretep 12y ago
  > If you've drunk the pets-vs-cattle koolaid Generally drinking the kool-aid is a bad thing - any reason to favour pets?

by alrs 12y ago

toomuchtodo 12y ago

> but it's still best practice to use ephemeral storage and architect accordingly Its not worth the engineer time. Use EBS volumes, clean them up when they're no longer in use after termination. The only time you need local/ephemeral storage is swap or scratch space, or throughput you can't get from general or provisioned EBS. Plus, you get auto recovery now without having to have architected for it ;)

gtaylor 12y ago
After I say this, they'll probably have a huge EBS-caused outage, but it feels like EBS is much more capable now than it was even a year or two ago. The General Purpose SSDs and the Provisioned IOPS have more than handled our performance concerns. Since that last awful multi-AZ outage a year or two ago, there hasn't been much to deal with for us.
gst 12y ago
EBS is great if it works for requirements, but unfortunately the maximum size of an EBS volume is limited to only 1 TB. With SSD instance storage you can get up to 6.4 TB.
- Rapzid 12y ago
  Fortunately AWS is releasing 16TB volumes in the near future :)

Rapzid 12y ago

Here is a fun story. Amazon's RDS services are backed by EBS. They also restart the instances automatically if they encounter issues. But sure, "Best PracticesTM".

alrs 12y ago
You're right, RDS is backed by EBS.

dice 12y ago

If you've drunk the pets-vs-cattle koolaid to the point where your instances are all (or mostly) ephermal then you're probably also using auto-scaling groups and don't care if a particular single instance falls over.

peteretep 12y ago
> If you've drunk the pets-vs-cattle koolaid Generally drinking the kool-aid is a bad thing - any reason to favour pets?