[Noisebridge-discuss] could you host my media wiki pages, 2-4 months?

[Ronald Cotoni]

Huh?  much of ec2 is not backed up.  No ephemeral storage is backed up, at
all, ever.  It is ephemeral.  That is the default instance store type.

And you are absolutely correct.  The days of playing with hardware is
almost done except when it is not.  When I think of a cloud like it is
described, I pay for an instance that NEVER goes down ever without me
configuring anything.  It just does it automatically.  I pay for ONE
instance and whether the datacenter along with whatever state it is in
suddenly is destroyed won't affect me in the slightest.  With EC2 you
actually have to understand how to build redundant systems using things
like the ELB and EBS, it doesn't just magically come like they lead you to
believe.  I used to manage ec2 servers in the "cloud" at my last systems
engineer role at a RoR shop.  It is a virtual machine nothing more and
nothing less.

The other problem is an ec2 compute unit is equal to a 1.8 ghz xeon from 7
or 8 years ago.  That is slower than an Atom.  Those lowendbox.com ones are
significantly faster than that at a fraction of the cost.  If you were
designing an app/service in the cloud manner properly, it woudln't be tied
to ec2 or any other single provider.

If you would like to discuss some systems architecture, perhaps we should
have a meetup at noisebridge on this.  There are others around but why not
make our own.  A lot of up and coming Systems administrators

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 5:03 PM, John Adams <jna at retina.net> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 4:35 PM, Ronald Cotoni <setient at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Huh.  ec2 instances are not backed up unless you write scripts to back
>> them up to SOMEWHERE.  They are not salable unless you actually make them
>> scalable (mysql replication, load balancing).  It isn't the "cloud" like
>> you think it is.  Also ec2 or ec2 clones are over priced for a single wiki.
>>  www.lowendbox.com for significantly cheaper VPS servers (that is really
>> all ec2 is by itself).   Also, I don't charge for hosting sites.  At all.
>>  You should really take a look at the hosting options out there
>> and evaluate them first hand before deciding for or against ec2 or really
>> any other option there.
>>
>>
>
> That www.lowendbox.com site looks like it was made in 1994 with Crayons.
> As he's running a blog that aggregates locations for cheap VPS, his site is
> fairly useful even if I don't like the design, though. With Amazon, if you
> want to go on the cheap, run a micro instance.
>
> Much of EC2 is backed up, The (stored version) of instance itself is held
> in S3 which is guaranteed against data loss.
>
> For data persistance across instances, you can mount EBS under LVM and
> schedule LVM snapshots of the EBS instance off to S3 via cron, guaranteed
> against data loss.  If you want to scale, you run more than one instance
> and use the load balancer functionality built into EC2 with dedicated,
> reserved IPs. If you want to auto-scale, use the autoscaler.
> http://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/
>
> There's a fundamental theory underpinning the EC2 strategy - You expect,
> demand, and want failure to occur. No single box or storage area is worth
> anything and when failure occurs you just move to a different instance.
> With MySQL, the whole concept of there being a Master (SPOF) and a Slave
> (yay, another SPOF) limits your ability to scale at all. Of course, If you
> don't want to fight with MySQL replication you can use Dynamo or other
> NoSQL stores instead of Mysql. While this requires substantially more labor
> and changes to code, it
>
> If you wanted to stick with MySQL, you could use Amazon RDS or migrate
> code to Amazon Simple DB. Both have high SLAs.
>
> So, fine, you have to set some things up, but it is *exactly* the "cloud"
> like I think it is. It's no hardware, no racking of gear, no dealing with
> networking, nothing. It's purely a software argument at that point and if
> the OS gets fucked up, I issue a single command and poof! A brand new
> machine in exactly the same configuration I was in a moment ago.
>
> Times have changed and the days of screwing around with hardware to run a
> small business or website are mostly over.
>
> ---
> John
> Twitter
>
>


-- 
Ronald Cotoni
Systems Engineer
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