Who's afraid of AWS? (2)

I promised a second entry so here we go.

Searchstorage have an article up covering user issues with AWS. It's interesting to see the negative feedback from SmugMug since if I recall they were quoted singing it's praises earlier on during it's lifecycle. In general however the consensus is in, perfectly fine for small businesses with little to no infrastructure, not bad for backups, but more than likely unacceptable for anyone with real scale.

These are all first generation approaches to storage from a socket so we'll see this idea continue to be developed as time goes on.

Lets talk about their other offering the Elastic Compute Cloud. This is server virtualization nothing more nothing less. You buy compute time on non-persistent Xen virtual machines running Linux on x86-64 processors (2GB of RAM, 150GB of storage per instance).

The machines can be created and destroyed by the user on the fly, which is useful the next time you need a QUAKE server for internet gaming. As I mentioned, they're not persistent so when you shut one down it's virtual volumes are nuked and reclaimed but you can export the state of the volumes to S3 as a machine image which you can then load into any number of instances you care to create. You can also forget your plans to use these instances as servers out on the net for the long term as IP assignment is done by DHCP. Reboot the server or renew the lease and who knows what address you'll end up with.

What EC2 is good for is short term ad-hoc work, it's not designed to be a long term thing.

Now pricing is where things get a bit sticky, you pay 10 cents per instance hour which means it doesn't matter if the virtual machine is 98% idle, you're paying the exact same price as the person who's running it at 100% utilization. You also pay 20 cents per GB of data transfered, unless that data is being transfered between EC2 & S3.

So what have we learned from this quick look at Amazon Web Services?

-Sweet damn all.

Oh wait...we've learned that none of this is rocket science and you can build the same stuff on your own, with better response times, and in your own data center using off the shelf components. You just might not be able to buy the hardware and bandwidth in as much bulk as Amazon can.