I met Amazon’s Web Services Evangelist Mike Culver at this week’s OpenCofee meetup. Mike visited as part of his tour of Australia and New Zealand.
Mike talked to us about Amazon Web Services and took questions from the group.
I gave Mike feedback on my experience with EC2. In the early days we used EC2 for hosting Gleemy, and it was great. We could start and stop a few Linux boxes as needed and we only paid for the time we used. For a small startup, that’s good news. When Flexiscale launched however, we couldn’t help but switch to it. I explained why to Mike:
- The biggest point of pain with EC2 is the risk of losing data. When an EC2 instance terminates or crashes, the disk is erased and any data you haven’t stored elsewhere is lost. Typically, you’d need to use a redundant server or periodically backup your data to S3. On Flexiscale, your virtual hard disk is stored on a SAN. This means your data persists after your instance goes down. Moreover, if a disk on the SAN goes down, it can be swapped for a new one without the need to power down your instance (and without you even knowing about it.) Mike told us this is a common complaint, and to expect EC2 to change accordingly sometime soon.
- Each time you start an EC2 instance, you are given a different public IP address. You need to use a system like dyndns for maintaining a domain name. Flexiscale gives you a static IP address which you don’t have to worry about changing.
- On Flexiscale, you can vary the parameters of your virtual host (memory configuration, hard disk size, OS) and pay accordingly. With EC2, you choose from one of 3 pre-configured instances.
Keep in mind, EC2 absolutely excels with distributed computing applications. Read their blog for some pretty amazing stories.
