Note to Nick: I havent forgotten your request and I’ll have something on that soon, but when I started in I found that I had something else to say about compute-on-demand (or compute-as-a-service – terms which i use somewhat interchangably) So here it is. For all those people just jumping into a project or considering [...]
Who this document is for: People looking to house large MySQL data-sets on Amazon’s EC2 service, and people looking for the best (that I’ve found) all-in-EC2 solution for fault tolerance and data retention. People looking to get maximum availability. Who this document is not for: People who are looking for something EASY. This isn’t it. [...]
Amazons EC2 service is, by all accounts, brillian. But one of the things that it lacks is any sort of assurance regarding data permanence. What I mean is each machine that you turn on has 160GB of storage, but if that server instance is ever shut off the data is *lost* (not corrubted byt GONE) [...]
I’m configuring myself a VMWare virtual machine running (well *instaling* right now) CentOS-4.4. Rather than worry about what to (and not to) install I’ve just opted for the 4CD “Everything” method. Hey… It works . I will be using this virtual machine to work with the EC2 tools. (yea… go figure. I work with Linux [...]
So now we know that we need to look at things in terms of pools or “stacks” of resources… But how? Thats a good question! And from here on out… It gets technical (even though we’re going to be talking in high level generalities) Now lets take on step back, and examine the tools that [...]
Our good friends at Amazon arrive on the scene. First they offered a stream of services which were interesting, but never really got your attention. But this last announcement. That one changes everything. And it does change everything. Unfortunately people are thinking of the service in terms of their current ideas of scaling infrastructure. And [...]
Lets take a look at your traditional web application setup (during development, or early stages with no funding). You might find something like this. We have a web, database, and specialty server. The specialty server is probably doing whatever makes the company unique. For simplicities sakes we’ll say its just crunching data from the database [...]