Got this message from Amazon today: Hello. This is a notification that your volume vol-XXXXXXXX experienced a failure due to multiple failures of the underlying hardware components and was unable to be recovered. We recommend recovering from your most recent snapshot. We regret the loss and inconvenience. Sincerely, XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX Fortunately, this was on a… Continue reading Thank goodness for useful snapshots
Tag: Amazon EC2
Amazon offers Reserved Instances
Amazon announced today the availability of Reserved Instances. Basically, you pay a one-time fee and get a significant discount on the hourly rate for that instance. Their rates are available here. After doing some calculations on it, I figured out the break even point between the old “On-Demand Instances” and the new “Reserved Instances.” For… Continue reading Amazon offers Reserved Instances
AWS Security Whitepaper
Amazon just posted a security whitepaper which describes the security measures they have in place to protect their customers. It’s a short read (9 pages) and I strongly recommend it if you are using EC2, S3 or SimpleDB for anything. They explain their security measures and make recommendations for further protection their customers can put… Continue reading AWS Security Whitepaper
Performance increase with Amazon’s EBS (persistent storage)
At familylink.com, we have 4 MySQL database systems on EC2 that run that our facebook app, various other social network apps and various websites. I recently switched our disk storage for those instances from the standard EC2 instance disks to EBS (Amazon’s persistent storage for EC2) and wanted to share some brief numbers with you… Continue reading Performance increase with Amazon’s EBS (persistent storage)
New EC2 instance types
Amazon just announced two new High-CPU instance types for EC2. Here’s a quick comparison of what you can now get compared to the previous offering: 2x Small ($0.20/hr) RAM – 3.4GB CPU – 2 Compute Units* DISK – 320GB High-CPU Medium ($0.20/hr) RAM – 1.7GB CPU – 5 Compute Units* DISK – 350GB Extra Large… Continue reading New EC2 instance types
How EC2 reduces database downtime
I recently had to alter(edit) a very large MySQL table on a production system to drop an unnecessary index. This particular table has over 15 million records in it and occupies over 6GB of space. Since this database runs the We’re Related facebook app, I couldn’t just bring it down for hours and make the… Continue reading How EC2 reduces database downtime
OpenSolaris on Amazon’s EC2, Yay!
For us UNIX fans, Sun Microsystems is working with Amazon to offer OpenSolaris on EC2. I’m not sure how I missed it, but they made the announcement last week. I just signed up to be included in the beta. I’ll post an update here when I get in and start tinkering. My main focus is… Continue reading OpenSolaris on Amazon’s EC2, Yay!
Amazon Web services bandwidth savings
Amazon just announced a price change for bandwidth for outbound traffic from EC2 and S3. The result is up to 26% reduction in costs for all outbound traffic depending on your volume. Here are the new prices which are effective May 1 New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008) $0.100 per GB – data… Continue reading Amazon Web services bandwidth savings
Static IP addresses for EC2
It looks like the easter bunny came a few days late for Amazon. Yay! They finally offer static IP addresses for Amazon EC2. This is a huge step for anyone wanting to use EC2 to host anything on the internet. They are free of charge if you are using them with a running instance. If… Continue reading Static IP addresses for EC2
Amazon Web Services for Facebook Developers
Facebook has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services. I don’t quite see what the partnership involves other than some Facebook specific documentation and extra samples of facebook apps that run using AWS. Either way, it’s good to see some more promotion of AWS. As you know, I’m a big fan. We’ve been using AWS… Continue reading Amazon Web Services for Facebook Developers