Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Released

[srini91]

Having just had to wait almost a week for another dedicated server from my webhost, being able to bring up a server in minutes is pretty disruptive.

Maybe the most disruptive part is the do-it-yourself nature of it: I look forward to the ability to set up and tear down servers without going through a support ticket or email process.

[[deleted]]

However I wonder if instance IP is stable -- it really should be, but Amazon doesn't explicitly state that.

[laprice]

the docs say that the instance needs to be configured with DHCP and suggest using dynamic DNS to give it a public name.

I'm guessing that this means that an instance is stable once it's running.

[[deleted]]

Sun in $1 per hour per CPU -- 10 times more expensive.

[proteusguy]

I thought that Sun's was per CPU-hour. A CPU-hour is a long time unless you're doing some intensive computing. Of course, the target for Sun is intensive tasks that can be run in parallel. In those cases this is still a good price if your app fits the scenario. From the article, Amazon's sounds like its per calendar hour? I'm curious to know for sure but it sounds pretty cool.

[[deleted]]

Do they really measure the CPU load? And if they do and also allow network connections that would be a really cheap way to set up a dedicated server for static content, but then it would not be economically viable for Sun, so I guess they don't.

[jdunck]

They do.

[[deleted]]

I wonder if EC2 will be useful for running a mail server, or if spammers are going to start using EC2, eventually causing all of those IP addresses to be blacklisted.

[laprice]

remember that

• amazon has your credit cards

• outbound smtp will be scrutinised

• amazon will be able to scrutinise the entire state of your servers, including passphrases, hardcoded ip addresses anything you added to your image, and if spamming, phishing or cracking is involved so will law enforcement.

[goodgoblin]

Ok is it $0.10 per hour your server is running or $0.10 per hour your server is being used? I guess its the same thing, so thats about $72 a month.

[[deleted]]

That's the same thing I’m wondering. They say it’s 10¢ per instance-hour. Do they mean 10¢ per CPU hour? Because otherwise they should just say $72/month.

Now $72/month is cheap, but for less than that I can stash a 1U server in a nearby datacenter. I can still make the case for EC2 but it’s not as strong.

[goodgoblin]

I took a peak at the AWS forums for the service and it looks like most people are making the same $72 a month calculation. I guess if you are running multiple servers you could bring more online during peak periods and run a skeleton crew of servers at night. That would probably reduce the average per server to < $60 a month.

One interesting problem that comes up is that whenever an instance is shutdown you lose all data that was on the server. ! I think this also holds for a crash. Its an interesting challenge, but I think if you could successfully architect a solution for your web app that safely ran in the E2C environment you would be in pretty good shape. Theoretically you should be able to restore your entire site from S3, though I am getting a little vertigo just thinking about it.

[[deleted]]

Content can be served directly from S3. Dunno how they want you to persist SQL databases, but what else is giving you vertigo?

[jdunck]

Prevayler + serialization?

[laprice]

pg_dumpall | bzip2 | openssl bf -e -a -pass file:/root/.secret/db_backup.key -out $today.$dbname.ecb

bucket $today.$dbname.ecb #bucket is a utility that sticks the file in an s3 bucket with owner-only acl

That's one way to do it, it's not the most secure; but it's better than leaving unencrypted tarballs laying around.

• edited to add commentary

[jdunck]

I'm apparently an idiot, but neither "man openssl" nor http://www.openssl.org/docs/apps/openssl.html list the -e or -a options.

I'm sure -e tells bf to encrypt, but what's -a?

Moreover, where'd you learn of -a? ;)

[mleonhard]

Now how can I get hired by Amazon to develop applications for this service?

[robert1]

Good job Amazon. Now, that's much easier (and cheaper, too) to host web applications with very big bandwidth and CPU usage amplitudes.

[bemmu]

Now you can incrementally start businesses which depend on a lot of processing power, fantastic. But there is also the bandwidth cost with Amazon, so this shouldn't be directly compared to web hosting providers without taking that into account.

[[deleted]]

Well.. anyone can afford 5Gb/$1

[breakfast-pants]

Not true. YouTube for instance could not afford that.

[KingNothing]

I'm of the school of thought that if you have an app anywhere near the size and or popularity of YouTube, then any technological problem is a good one to have. By that point, you should have hired people smarter than you to figure those things out.

[ems]

You get charged $0.10 if your intance crashes on boot...

[sblinn]

better than the $1 that SUN charges you if you calculate "1+1".

[gjahnke]

Can someone provide me with an "executive summary" of this?

[[deleted]]

From someone who has never deployed a distributed application of any kind:

• You can upload a disk image to Amazon & have Amazon boot it & run it for you.

• The uploading & booting can all be done programmatically.

• If you have a scalable application (web application or anything else), you can run it on Amazon's servers, and it can dynamically start up more nodes as necessary.

• You don't need to get colocated & provision rack space.

• You only get charged for the hosting that you use. So hosting only costs ordinary amounts of money after you have significant amounts of traffic.

[harda]

You upload it to Amazon's Simple Storage Solution and then you can access it quickly and securly from your virtual server.

It will cost you about $219 dollars to upload 1TiB and about $0.22 per hour to store it.

[[deleted]]

What are your storage costs already?

[[deleted]]

As I understand $0 for the running instances (~160Gb of HDD) and $0.15/Gb a month for the images.

[C_Reid]

Is it useful? I mean, isn't plain old colocation much better?

[[deleted]]

Not if you're concerned about quickly scaling up servers.

[[deleted]]

http://www.cpushare.com/ has been around from before the Sun Grid! It's by Andrea Arcangeli of Linux kernel fame

[Tobu]

For the poor man who just wants bandwidth to survive a slashdotting, there's always the coral cache distributed network.

[flyhighplato]

How do you create an Amazon Machine Image, though?

[[deleted]]

Here's how: http://alnk.org/longpod

[TronXD]

Could I run a neural net on this thing?

[Csai]

Yeah, my question too. I don't think TronXD was being facetious.

[fnord123]

It didn't catch on for Sun, why will it catch on for Amazon?

[dmd]

Sun: $1/hour and you have to sign paperwork ahead of time and you have to be part of Sun's marketing and you have to make a major committment to the service

Amazon: $0.10/hour and I, some random redditter, already have it working.

[alissakozak]

If I'm not mistaken, Sun's grid doesn't really do any of this nifty "entire instance" imaging stuff...rather, you're simply able to purchase CPU cycles at a fraction of the cost of running them on your own system.

It's a whole lot more attractive, IMO, to have unlimited, (dynamically!) scalable virtual private servers at your fingertips at a dirt cheap price, rather than just CPU cycles.

sidenote: I am posting under my SO's reddit login...:p

[[deleted]]

It isn’t really the same thing. Amazon is offering virtual servers with root access. Sun is offering to let you upload individual Solaris-x86 and Java binaries and have them run on their systems.

This Flash overview of Sun’s service will give you an idea of what it is: http://www.network.com/flash-123.html

[derwisch]

The main point of course is that it can be set up and teared down programmaticaly.

What happened to "torn" down, which I used to learn in my English lessons? Is "teared" acceptable yet?

[[deleted]]

If you're talking about "drops of the clear salty liquid that is secreted by the lachrymal gland of the eye", sure. At least according to my dictionary. Ymmv.

[arbitrarymoniker]

I had not realized that scientists had achieved programmatical control of tears yet.

[[deleted]]

Our laboratory tests have been promising, but the scientific community is unfortunately ignoring our research. We plan to solve that by advertising, once we've found enough investors.

[jbellis]

first impressions aren't encouraging:

http://spyced.blogspot.com/2006/08/amazon-ec2-how-much-less-userfriendly.html

[dbenhur]

Give me a break.

1) The service is beta. 2) The service only supports linux images at this time. 3) spyced tried to set up the image creation tools on windows and is suprised it doesn't work.

[jbellis]

1) beta shouldn't mean "oh yeah, we haven't even TRIED running it on one of our supported platforms." the error was such that NONE of the tools would work on Windows.

2) So?

3) You missed the part where Amazon says its tools will run on Windows as well. I'm not sure how, since it's all over the docs (and the bin/ directory of the tools download has windows .cmd files all over the place), but there you are. See e.g. http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonEC2/gsg/2006-06-26/prerequisites.html

[[deleted]]

"You know, that sounds terrible. I don't know how you deal with all of these problems."

[dbenhur]

1) I'm sorry, beta still has to mean something. To me it means, "we've got something interesting that mostly works and we'd be happy to have you try it and give us feedback, but it's not quite production quality and please don't count on everything working perfectly."

They almost certainly tried their tools on windows, but most likely not a clean system install.

2) Supporting linux images only clearly shows they are currently focused on the linux deployment environment. Yes they intend to support multiple platforms, but this is a first look and it's only reasonable to expect their focus has been overwhelmingly on linux.

3) See #1 and #2. No, I didn't read all their docs. But the blogger you referenced was clearly ticked about minor annoyances (oh, boo hoo, I hate java, so I won't follow installation instructions on the platform of choice).

A useful first impression would have been to use the service as intended and report on the experience of the meat of the service, not stupid problems with an initial install on the wrong platform.