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We run a busy web app, with most traffic being USA based. Our IT department is currently in the process of migrating our web server to the Amazon AWS EC2 environment and I'd like to make sure we set it up correctly geographically ...
Currently, the test environment AMI instance they set up is in the USA West region (North California). However, our traffic originates much more from Eastern than Western/Mountain regions (though the latter are hardly negligible). Our original hosting server is in Texas.
1) I think we will need to move the test AMI instance to USA East (Virginia) region where most of our traffic is. Is it easy to "move" or "mirror" an AMI to another region? Ideally, our primary instance would be in Virginia and we'd have another instance "mirrored" in California, which would sync any changes that we make to the primary instance.
2) Perhaps we should create a CloudFront CDN distribution instead of multiple AMIs in different regions? Or utilize both CloudFront CDN + two AMI instances set up, one for each coast?
3) [side question] Seems like we would need two separate AMI instances set up anyway to enable the load balancing feature in EC2?
First of all, think about having some kind of configuration management system available. With this you basically define a set of "roles" or "recipes" and assign your servers or instances to these roles. They will then automatically install, which makes tasks like changing the AWS region very easy. Have a look at this Wiki page for an overview.
While the latency inside the US is not that big compared to sending packages of the ocean, I would suggest to move your instance to your main traffic region, that is US east. However I do not think it is necessary in the first step to have another machine up and running in another region. I would suggest to use a service like Pingdom to measure your latency from different geographical regions. If you have the need to have another server up and running, you can still add it afterwards.
However what I would strongly suggest is using Cloudfront or another CDN. As most webpages have a lot of static files like images, css or javascript files, make sure they get delivered fast to the user. With Cloudfront you can always make sure that they will be served from the nearest endpoint. You will have a significant speedup through this.
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Recently, I've done some comparison between using Database as a service (e.g. CloudSQL on GCP and RDS/Aurora on AWS) and using VMs (e.g. Compute Engine on GCP and EC2 on AWS).
It turns out with the same type of machine/server, Database as a service is costing double as the price of setting us own VMs.
For example, on AWS, the r5.4xlarge EC2 instance costs $1.208/hour; while, the r5.4xlarge RDS costs $2.28/hour. Worse than that, Aurora costs $2.8/hour.
On GCP, the n1-high-mem-16 compute engine instance costs $686.33/month; while the n1-high-mem-16 CloudSQL costs $1387.98/month.
Why don't people spin up an EC2 instance or Compute Engine instance and set up their own MySQL?
It would be appreciated for you to write down your reasons of choosing the database as a service (CloudSQL or RDS or Aurora) than setting up a database on VMs?
I can't generalise, but at one of the previous companies I worked for, they did a thourough analysis.
They included the cost of people needed to setup the database in high-available mode, added the continuous costs of backups and keeping up-to-date with security patches, which needed to be prepared in advance for every patch.
When you have a managed service it's an all-in-one package, and it was actually cheaper or less risky than having to hire a (part-time) DBA.
They also calculated in the adoption rate of innovation. When they needed e.g. MongoDB or Redis, a managed service could be adopted in a week instead of having to wait for several months for someone to analyse all risks and options to set it up in a High-Available state and coming up with a Security plan.
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I'm friends with an owner of a small creative business (with multiple departments) and until now they have been using a dedicated server (via a 3rd party) for a lot of internal projects and they've been known to iframe a few small dev projects (like photo galleries, one page sites etc...) off and on for some of their clients (some with hi traffic sites).
They're looking to switch from the dedicated server to a cloud environment. The owner is enamored with amazon's cloud services, but still wanted some alternative options they also want the new environment to mirror the current one as much as possible (linux/centOS, PHP 5.3, mysql databases) but with the ability to scale when desired.
So the misconceptions I need cleared up and questions I have are:
1) I always assumed amazon's cloud service was more suitable for high end high traffic complex web application (Netflix, pinterest, instagram etc...) rather than the typical server use listed above. Is this correct?
2) Is it possible to mirror their current setup on amazon?
3) If number 1 is not true, but they instead chose rackspace, could they run heavy web apps like Netflix, pinterest, instagram on a rackspace cloud server if they ever decided to do something that advanced (is rackspace scaleable in the same way ec2 is)?
1) Amazon AWS is also suitable for this environment, or even smaller ones (they offer instances as small as "Micro", which are far less capable than what you are describing all the way up to GPU compute clusters).
2) Yes. That is a very common setup for an AWS-based solution. In fact, I recently migrated something similar from Rackspace to AWS.
3) #1 is true. However, you can certainly mix what runs on Rackspace and in the AWS cloud. Keep in mind latency and security issues if the two component solutions need to communicate with each other. Rackspace also has a cloud offering, but it is not as mature as Amazons.
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My portal will be mainly accessed in India and it involves uploading/viewing of images which means good data transfer will be involved.
If I host my portal on servers located in India; surely it will be faster to access the pages. But I want to personally use Amazon web services. Do we have option in Amazon so that we can host our tomcat server and save images on some servers located in India ; or at max. in Singapore so that access is fairly faster.
Amazon Web Services offers several AWS datacenter Regions for most of their Products & Services within their steadily expanding global infrastructure, amongst those the Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region (usually referred to as ap-southeast-1).
Furthermore they do offer even more so called edge locations for Amazon CloudFront, which is their Content delivery network (CDN) alike web service for content delivery.
You can see an overview of the current regions and edge locations on their Global Infrastructure map.
There is an API oriented Regions and Endpoints listing as well, see e.g. those for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) (please note that not every region does necessarily support every single available product, especially beta offerings are usually available in us-east-1 only initially).
Consequently you should be fine using ap-southeast-1 for your use case, though as usual you might want to give it a try before settling on this, which is fairly easy to do by means of the AWS Free Usage Tier offering.
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I have thought a lot recently about the different hosting types that are available out there. We can get pretty decent latency (average) from an EC2 instance in Europe (we're situated in Sweden) and the cost is pretty good. Obviously, the possibility of scaling up and down instances is amazing for us that's in a really expansive phase right now.
From a logical perspective, I also believe that Amazon probably can provide better availability and stability than most hosting companies on the market. Probably it will also outweigh the need of having a phone number to dial when we wonder anything and force us to google the things by ourselves :)
So, what should we be concerned about if we were about to run our web server on EC2? What are the pro's and cons?
To clarify, we will run a pretty standard LAMP configuration with memcached added probably.
Thanks
So, what should we be concerned about if we were about to run our web server on EC2? What are the pro's and cons?
The pros and cons of EC2 are somewhat dependent on your business. Below is a list of issues that I believe affect large organizations:
Separation of duties Your existing company probably has separate networking and server operations teams. With EC2 it may be difficult to separate these concerns. ie. The guy defining your Security Groups (firewall) is probably the same person who can spin up servers.
Home access to your servers Corporate environments are usually administered on-premise or through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) with two-factor authentication. Administrators with access to your EC2 control panel can likely make changes to your environment from home. Note further that your EC2 access keys/accounts may remain available to people who leave or get fired from your company, making home access an even bigger problem...
Difficulty in validating security Some security controls may inadvertently become weak. Within your premises you can be 99% certain that all servers are behind a firewall that restricts any admin access from outside your premises. When you're in the cloud it's a lot more difficult to ensure such controls are in place for all your systems.
Appliances and specialized tools do not go in the cloud Specialized tools cannot go into the cloud. This may impact your security posture. For example, you may have some sort of network intrusion detection appliances sitting in front of on-premise servers, and you will not be able to move these into the cloud.
Legislation and Regulations I am not sure about regulations in your country, but you should be aware of cross-border issues. For example, running European systems on American EC2 soil may open your up to Patriot Act regulations. If you're dealing with credit card numbers or personally identifiable information then you may also have various issues to deal with if infrastructure is outside of your organization.
Organizational processes Who has access to EC2 and what can they do? Can someone spin up an Extra Large machine and install their own software? (Side note: Our company http://LabSlice.com actually adds policies to stop this from happening). How do you backup and restore data? Will you start replicating processes within your company simply because you've got a separate cloud infrastructure?
Auditing challenges Any auditing activities that you normally undertake may be complicated if data is in the cloud. A good example is PCI -- Can you actually always prove data is within your control if it's hosted outside of your environment somewhere in the ether?
Public/private connectivity is a challenge Do you ever need to mix data between your public and private environments? It can become a challenge to send data between these two environments, and to do so securely.
Monitoring and logging You will likely have central systems monitoring your internal environment and collecting logs from your servers. Will you be able to achieve the monitoring and log collection activities if you run servers off-premise?
Penetration testing Some companies run periodic penetration testing activities directly on public infrastructure. I may be mistaken, but I think that running pen testing against Amazon infrastructure is against their contract (which make sense, as they would only see public hacking activity against infrastructure they own).
I believe that EC2 is definitely a good idea for small/medium businesses. They are rarely encumbered by the above issues, and usually Amazon can offer better services than an SMB could achieve themselves. For large organizations EC2 can obviously raise some concerns and issues that are not easily dealt with.
Simon # http://blog.LabSlice.com
The main negative is that you are fully responsible for ALL server administration. Such as : Security patches, Firewall, Backup, server configuration and optimization.
Amazon will not provide you with any OS or higher level support.
If you would be FULLY comfortable running your own hardware then it can be a great cost savings.
i work in a company and we are hosting with amazon ec2, we are running one high cpu instance and two small instances.
i won't say amazon ec2 is good or bad but just will give you a list of experiences of time
reliability: bad. they have a lot of outages. only segments mostly but yeah...
cost: expensive. its cloud computing and not server hosting! a friend works in a company and they do complex calculations that every day have to be finished at a certain time sharp and the calculation time depends on the amount of data they get... they run some servers themselves and if it gets scarce, they kick in a bunch of ec2's.
thats the perfect use case but if you run a server 24/7 anways, you are better of with a dedicated rootserver
a dedicated root server will give you as well better performance. e.g. disk reads will be faster as it has a local disk!
traffic is expensive too
support: good and fast and flexible, thats definately very ok.
we had a big launch of a product and had a lot of press stuff going on and there were problems with the reverse dns for email sending. the amazon guys got them set up all ripe conform and nice in not time.
amazon s3 hosting service is nice too, if you need it
in europe i would suggest going for a german hosting provider, they have very good connectivity as well.
for example here:
http://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq4/
http://www.ovh.de/produkte/superplan_mini.xml
http://www.server4you.de/root-server/server-details.php?products=0
http://www.hosteurope.de/produkt/Dedicated-Server-Linux-L
http://www.klein-edv.de/rootserver.php
i have hosted with all of them and made good experiences. the best was definately hosteurope, but they are a bit more expensive.
i ran a CDN and had like 40 servers for two years there and never experienced ANY outage on ANY of them.
amazon had 3 outages in the last two months on our segments.
One minus that forced me to move away from Amazon EC2:
spamhaus.org lists whole Amazon EC2 block on the Policy Block List (PBL)
This means that all mail servers using spamhaus.org will report "blocked using zen.dnsbl" in your /var/log/mail.info when sending email.
The server I run uses email to register and reset passwords for users; this does not work any more.
Read more about it at Spamhaus: http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/query/PBL361340
Summary: Need to send email? Do not use Amazon EC2.
The other con no one has mentioned:
With a stock EC2 server, if an instance goes down, it "goes away." Any information on the local disk is gone, and gone forever. You have the added responsibility of ensuring that any information you want to survive a server restart is persisted off of the EC2 instance (into S3, RDS, EBS, or some other off-server service).
I haven't tried Amazon EC2 in production, but I understand the appeal of it. My main issue with EC2 is that while it does provide a great and affordable way to move all the blinking lights in your server room to the cloud, they don't provide you with a higher level architecture to scale your application as demand increases. That is all left to you to figure out on your own.
This is not an issue for more experienced shops that can maintain all the needed infrastructure by themselves, but I think smaller shops are better served by something more along the lines of Microsoft's Azure or Google's AppEngine: Platforms that enforce constraints on your architecture in return for one-click scalability when you need it.
And I think the importance of quality support cannot be underestimated. Look at the BitBucket blog. It seems that for a while there every other post was about the downtime they had and the long hours it took for Amazon to get back to them with a resolution to their issues.
Compare that to Github, which uses the Rackspace cloud hosting service. I don't use Github, but I understand that they also have their share of downtime. Yet it doesn't seem that any of that downtime is attributed to Rackspace's slow customer support.
Two big pluses come to mind:
1) Cost - With Amazon EC2 you only pay for what you use and the prices are hard to beat. Being able to scale up quickly to meet demands and then later scale down and "return" the unneeded capacity is a huge win depending on your needs / use case.
2) Integration with other Amazon web services - this advantage is often overlooked. Having integration with Amazon SimpleDB or Amazon Relational Data Store means that your data can live separate from the computing power that EC2 provides. This is a huge win that sets EC2 apart from others.
Amazon cloud monitoring service and support is charged extra - the first one is quite useful and you should consider that and the second one too if your app is mission critical.
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Is it possible to load / host an entire website using AWS? Or is it only a service that can load specific pieces of a website - such as images, etc. Obviously, I'd want to use my own domain. If you can use it, are there any limitations?
Here's the AWS link, for context:
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
AWS = Amazon Web Services = a suite of different web services.
S3 (which you linked to) is an object store. You can't host a web service on S3.
EC2, also under the AWS umbrella, is virtualized compute space. You CAN host a web service on EC2. It is just like having a server in a rack somewhere, except that when you shut down an instance, it is gone forever. But using EBS, which is like a virtualized hard drive, will prevent you from losing your data when the EC2 instance shuts down.
See http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ and http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/
EDIT: Aug 12, 2016 they have a dedicated section on how to get started hosting a website on AWS. Please note S3 only allows STATIC websites but AWS provides SDKs in case you want to run PHP, ASP.NET, etc on your instance. See the links for more details.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html
https://aws.amazon.com/websites/
So guess what I just found while doing some Google searches for hosting on AWS?! A blog post by the AWS stating that you can (now) host a website on S3. (Funny enough, the StackOverflow and the AWS post were right next to each other in the SERPs!)
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-on-amazon-s3.html
Yes it is completely possible to host websites on AWS in 2 ways:
1.) Easy - S3 (Simple Storage Solution) is a bucket storage solution that lets you serve static content e.g. images but has recently been upgraded so you can use it to host flat .html files and your site will get served by a default Apache installation with very little configuration on your part (but also little control).
2.) Trickier - You can use EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and create a virtual Linux instance then install Apache/NGinx (or whatever) on that to give you complete control over serving whatever/however you want. You use SecurityGroups to enable/disable ports for individual machines or groups of them.
#danben your EC2 instance does not have a constant public IP by default. Amazon makes you use a CNAME - not an A record as your IP may change under load. You have to pay for an ElasticIP to get a consistent public IP for your setup (or use some sort of DynDNS)
As #danben mentioned, there is a difference between S3 and EC2.
One thing that may be interesting for people looking to host a website on Amazon, specially if they want to start small is that Amazon started offering a free tier some months ago. Together with services like BitNami Cloud Hosting (disclaimer, I helped design it, so it is a bit like my baby :) means you can get your site on the Amazon cloud in just minutes, for basically 0 dollars. You still need to give credit card info to Amazon, but it will not be charged if you stay within the limits of their free tier.
One thing to consider too is that at the time of writing this (Jul 2011), Amazon restricts you to one IP address per server. If you need to host multiple domains, you may need to use name-based virtual hosts or some tricks using their Elastic Load Balancer (which will cost you more). But all in all, it is worth a try if you are a bit technical and want more control than what shared hosting provides you
At reinvent 2018, AWS launched the Amplify Console, a continuous deployment and hosting service for single page and static apps with serverless backends. Check it out: http://console.amplify.aws
Yes! You can easily host your website on AWS.
There are two ways;
One with Native AWS - This is a tricky method that requires expertise and a series of commands to run. You need to manage security, DNS, SSL, server protocols, and more by yourself.
Managed Cloud Platforms like Cloudways - You can easily launch an AWS server and host your website with a few clicks. Moreover, you can quickly manage your server protocols, packages, security firewalls, DNS, and more from its intuitive platform.