I want to run an server for an application I have.
I'm a complete beginner with AWS, so bear with me.
There will be about 50 users (all from the same time zone) that will be accessing the server and I would like to have near 100% availability.
The application I have requires 2 processors and 2GB ram.
I could pay for a machine 24/7 or even only 18 hours a day, assuming I turn it off at night, but I there will be some days where the server is not used at all.
I was wondering if the following is possible: when amazon detects that someone is requesting something from my server, it turns it on in real time, and then forwards the request to my server. After say 5 minutes of no activity, it will turn my server off. This way I can only pay for hours when there is traffic.
Is this possible?
How have people solved similar problems?
No this isn't possible. There is nothing built into AWS to detect traffic and start an EC2 server like you suggest. Plus the startup time on an EC2 server is at least a couple minutes, so those first incoming requests would have to wait a really long time.
You might want to look into running multiple small servers instead of a single larger server. AWS does have the ability to balance the load across multiple servers and add/remove servers from the pool based on traffic. You could have as few as one server running when there is no traffic, and have more servers automatically created as load increases. Look into the AWS Elastic Beanstalk service for this.
If you want to run a truly "serverless" environment where you only pay for compute cycles in milliseconds, instead of servers by the hour, you could look into using AWS Lambda. If you can architect your system to run on Lambda you are almost guaranteed to save costs, but it can be a real challenge to convert an existing system to this sort of architecture.
If you want to look outside AWS you might find something more along the lines of what you describe with Google App Engine. Heroku's free tier also works similarly to your description, but as soon as you outgrow the free tier you have to upgrade to always-running instances.
Does anyone know if there are any competing hosting alternatives I can explore other than Amazon Web Services for running very small instances of Windows virtual machines? I have used AWS for years but am thinking that it might be worth-while to see if there are better alternatives.
In particular, the scenario I have is this: I have created a Windows virtual machine image with the applications and configuration I want and then spin up VMs based on that image as I need from on the AWS spot market. I can go weeks at a time without needing any virtual machines but then will spin up 20 VMs for a few hours to do a particular job. I typically pay around .61 cents an hour per micro Windows VM running on AWS (keep in mind that the AWS spot market is way cheaper than reserved instances).
Does Microsoft Azure or any other service support a similar scenario? I don't mind paying a little more if the performance and such is better. However, it is absolutely critical that I can set things up so I only have to pay for VMs when I actually need them rather than keep paying for VMs that aren't in use.
Microsoft Azure has the capability you are looking for. You can upload your own images and then quickly deploy extra-small machines based on it. On Azure you can turf off the VM's through the Azure portal after you are finished with them and you will not be charged. Make sure that you do it through the portal and not the windows session or you will continue to be billed.
Check out this link for pricing information:
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/
You can follow these steps to upload your image to your azure account:
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-create-upload-vhd-windows-server/
Also, you can scale up very easy in the azure portal so this might help reduce your need for spinning up multiple machines.
If I have a website, hosted with a standard hosting company, and I would like to move it to a Dedicated machine, maybe EC2, is there a way to compare my current traffic to usage of a cloud machine?
Hosting companies gives you plan measured in Bandwith/Space while EC2 in usage time.
So I'm looking for a way to predict machine usage time based on my current traffic data for costs evaluation.
Thanx!
I'm not sure you're understanding usage time correctly. For your website to exist on EC2, you'll need to create one or more instances depending on the architecture you use. This is the same as a dedicated hosting setup elsewhere except with cloud instances.
The difference lies with billing. Where a traditional hosting company will charge you monthly, EC2 charges you per instance hour, or every hour you have an instance running. Therefore, for hosting a website, you'll have the server running 24/7 which will equate to roughly 720 hrs a month charged at a few cents per hour.
The key thing to work out is how many/what size instances you'll need to run your site at the equivalent performance you're seeing now, and that's only something you'll figure out with testing.
In their pricing they list iis/sql server only possible under large instances:
http://aws.amazon.com/windows/
which costs upwards of $800 per month.
However several how-to blog posts show using AMIs with IIS/SQL server with small instances (which presumably costs about 80 dollars a month).
http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/wordpress-in-the-cloud-with-ec2-and-wpi
http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2009/01/13/how-to-run-windows-amp-iis-in-the-cloud-on-amazon-ec2-in-15-mins.aspx
I wonder if this has licensing issues. Does any one know if this is legit (i.e. doesn't break TOS) and if so, is the pricing the same for IIS/SQL vs. normal windows small instances? (I ask because they have seperate pricing for larger instances.)
According to your link, windows/sql/iis will work on any instance:
On-Demand Instances
SQL Server Express Edition, Microsoft
IIS and ASP.NET can be used on any
Amazon EC2 instance running Windows
Server for no additional cost.
Reserved instances are always large and are like buying a dedicated server but you don't necessarily need one of those.
It is possible and relatively easy to set up. The one tricky part is that small instances are all 32 bit and the first machine image (AMI) that pops up with IIS and SQL Server Express is a 64 bit image. When first create the instance you get a page of popular AMIs and the only one with SQL Server Express is the 64 bit image. You have to search for a 32 bit version. I am using this 32 bit AMI with a small instance and it works fine: Windows-Server2008-i386-SqlExpress-v103 (ami-c5e40dac).
Also by default all the SQL services are disabled so you have to go into services and enable them (SQL Server, SQL Server Browser, SQL Server Agent...).
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
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.