ec2

Amazon just shipped their new attachable volume service for EC2. Now you can mount a persistent store to your instances, and not worry about them disappearing if your instance crashes or is de-commissioned.

Pricing is $0.10 per GB per month plus $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests. Back-of-the-napkin estimate for a 100GB volume used for a high volume web site would cost $36 per month.

予算立てにご利用ください.

This looks like a great addition to Amazon S3 and EC2 - they now have a way of creating simple tables with up to 256 attribute/value pairs. Support for GET, PUT, DELETE, and QUERY.

There are a number of things missing over a real relational database (or even an ISAM). S3 is a simple "blob" store - where each object get be atomically read and written. SimpleDB gives some simple query capability (for smaller data items - 1K max per attribute).

I also see no way to get ORDERBY functionality and, of course, no aggregate values (SUM, MAX, etc). Sometimes this can be overcome in the application layer, but it will make your application more complex than using a traditional database.

Most importantly, there are no JOIN's in this system. This will require the application to make multiple QUERYs to get the data needed to generate a view.

I found it very interesting that this document states that Amazon promotes developers running traditional databases in EC2. My understanding is that Amazon can arbitrarily wipe the state of any machine on EC2 - which would cause you to have to restore the database from some an S3 or external backup.

Maybe someone who is using EC2 for running a database server can chime in on how well that works for them.

Quoted: Amazon SimpleDB - a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. Provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity

Was curious if there was an elastic computing offering for Windows. Seems like there are a few, and Microsoft is planning to launch its own in October.

Quoted: A few companies have attempted to offer on demand Windows clouds including Terremark's "The Enterprise Cloud" (VMware based) and Gogrid. But both have yet to release an API for programmatic access, so there usefulness in a truly "elastic computing" environment is questionable.

Cluster computing in EC2

The part I found interesting was the first detailed description of using the MapReduce model to run large-scale Expectation Maximization (EM) computations in parallel. An implementation of this on Hadoop and Amazon EC2 will let you tackle some large scale

I’m sure this isn’t the only one, after all, SmugMug’s CEO told me that they had moved pretty much everything over to Amazon’s S3 a while back.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114501
Yes or no: Should web startups host on Amazon?

Robert Dempsey guides you through the steps of building a web spidering application using Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, and Amazon S3.