CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-ec2
Ben
Ben

Reputation: 62494

Amazon EC2 consideration - redundancy and elastic IPs

I've been tasked with determining if Amazon EC2 is something we should move our ecommerce site to. We currently use Amazon S3 for a lot of images and files. The cost would go up by about $20/mo for our host costs, but we could sell our server for a few thousand dollars. This all came up because right now there are no procedures in place if something happened to our server.

How reliable is Amazon EC2? Is the redundancy good, I don't see anything about this in the FAQ and it's a problem on our current system I'm looking to solve.

Are elastic IPs beneficial? It sounds like you could point DNS to that IP and then on Amazon's end, reroute that IP address to any EC2 instance so you could easily get another instance up and running if the first one failed.

I'm aware of scalability, it's the redundancy and reliability that I'm asking about.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2481

Answers (3)

Roopesh Shenoy
Roopesh Shenoy

Reputation: 3427

Yeah I think moving from inhouse server to Amazon will definitely make a lot of sense economically. EBS backed instances ensure that even if the machine gets rebooted, the transient memory is not lost. And if you have a clear separation between your application and data layer and can have them on different machines, then you can build even better redundancy for your data.

For ex, if you use mysql, then you can consider using Amazon RDS service - which gives you a highly available and reliable MySQL instance, fully managed (patches and all). The application layer then can be made more resilient by having more smaller instances rather than one larger instance, through load balancing.

The cost you will save on is really hardware maintenance and the cost you would have to incur to build in disaster recovery.

Upvotes: 0

efalcao
efalcao

Reputation: 5166

At work, I've had something like 20-40 instances running at all times for over a year. I think we've had 1-3 alert emails come from amazon suggesting that we terminate and boot another instance (presumably because they are detecting possible failure in the underlying hardware). We've never had an instance go down suddenly, which seems rather good.

Elastic IP's are amazing and are part of the solution. The other part is being able to rapidly bring up new instances. I've learned that you shouldn't care about instances going down, that it's more important to use proper load balancing and be able to bring up commodity instances quickly.

Upvotes: 2

poolnoodl
poolnoodl

Reputation: 411

Yes, it's very good. If you aren't able to put together a concurrent redundancy (where you have multiple servers fulfilling requests simultaneously), using the elastic IP to quickly redirect to another EC2 instance would be a way to minimize downtime.

Upvotes: 2

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