With the addition of the storage volumes there’s no doubt in my mind anymore: the cloud adopters will have much more computing horsepower and flexibility at their fingertips than those who are still racking their own machines. Cloud computing is going to be as significant for deployment as agile is for software development. You either compute in the cloud or you’ll be left behind by your competitors because they can deploy faster, better, and cheaper than you can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBajLxeKqoY

I am a complete newbie and this was a great help in getting me started.

Could you point us to where the below excerpt is covered in the forums? I haven’t been able to find it:

> be too critical of the product until it hits prime time, okay guys?, and > B) the AWS team is working on an immutable storage system to connect to > EC2 (so sayeth the forums mods.)

Thanks!

I have solved the problem of immutable or persistent storage for EC2 – and the answer is found right on Amazon. It is called S3.

Now before you say it – yes I realize that the tools AMAZON provides to access S3 are arcane, and do not allow you to use the S3 storage in a meaningful way in a live server.

However…..

What if I told you that there is a way to configure your access to your S3 account, such that you can actually MOUNT your S3 directory directly into your server environment, and use it natively as you would a local hard drive? At that point S3 becomes the worlds largest, most redundant, and most fail safe SAN ever to exist!

The answer to this question – is Jungledisk. You can download an evaluation copy free at http://www.jungledisk.com. If you use it there is a $20 lifetime registration fee good for an unlimited amount of servers. Basically beer and pizza money for a product that makes EC2 1000 times more viable. I have even posted into the forums there under linux how you would set this up under an Ubuntu 7.10 instance – but I have done it on a Redhat system also – and it should work on pretty much any flavor of Linux.

Using this method I have achieved direct access speeds to S3 of 63MB/s – or 500mbps throughput – half a gig! Certainly not light speed – but indeed – quite usable for almost all applications.

And the beauty of it is that I put the link in /mnt/s3. Thats it. You can do anything with this link you can do with any other directory. Just map the files and applications you need to keep persistent in the event of an EC2 instance shutdown, and you are golden. It is extremely stable, and simply works.

No – I am not a person associated with this company in any way. I am simply a user like yourself who found a simple, durable, and effective solution to one of the major problems encountered in EC2.

I hope this helps.

User data is stored in a RAIDed volume or on a NAS appliance with RAIDed volumes within the grid of redundant servers, which means that it is available without interruption even if a server goes down. AppLogic is oriented around “Applications” which are networks of Appliances in a private address space. Even if an Appliance is restarted after a failure, it gets the same dns name inside the Application that it had before (as maintained by AppLogic) so other Appliances in the Application can continue to refer to it successfully. The switchover usually takes just a few minutes after hardware failures.

There are currently 3 ways to use AppLogic. You can purchase utility computing from my company, ENKI, on a pay-as-you-go basis which allows you to set up a virtual private data center (AppLogic Application) and scale it on demand. In this case, you don’t need to know anything about AppLogic to use it since we manage it for you. You can also lease a stack of servers from a managed service provider offering AppLogic and manage it yourself or hire us to manage it for you, or if you’re working for a big enough company, 3Tera will lease AppLogic licenses to you for use in your data center.

-Eric Novikoff (www.ComputingUtility.com)