Sorry, things have been quiet here for awhile. I have been hard at work on MailTank, which has been getting more attention and customers! Woohoo!

Lately my real fun has been playing with Amazon AWS. I signed up late last year, but just didn’t find time to kick the tires until now.

Last month I spent a couple days getting some EC2 instances running, learning to configure things and save images. This lead me to migrate F8P.com from Mediatemple.net’s Grid Service to an EC2 server running Fedora Core 6.

So far, I am very impressed, though nervous. You see EC2 requires you to think about servers differently. They are 100% virtual servers including the 160GB of “storage”. This has caused a lot of tension in the AWS forums.

My nervousness is subsiding as I grapple with the realty most developers dread - man down! a server has crashed!

When a server crashes in a normal data center, you have a chance of recovering data from a hard drive assuming it is not the source of the crash. If an EC2 server crashes or “goes away”, you loose everything on that server. It is GONE for good.

A lot of developers are writing EC2 off because of this design constraint. After much consideration and experimentation I don’t think there is anything different from the old tried and true way of doing things.

Using multiple instances and frequent backups there is no reason that you can not mitigate the risk EC2’s constraints impose.

Over the coming months I am going to be pushing more EC2 and S3 services into our daily production infrastructure. We expect to double or triple our existing capacity while reducing costs substantially.

It is going to be a wild ride for certain!

Hmm. Now if only I could run Mac OS X on an EC2 instance. That would be very interesting indeed.

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