arghyle

After a few weeks of looking into Amazon’s EC2 service I finally decided to sign up for a beta account and give it a test run. Right now I don’t have any specific need for it, but I am always researching ideas and interested in learning about new technologies and services. I was going to put together a long article about EC2, but opted instead to jot down a few notes that people unfamiliar with the service might like to know.

• This should come as no surprise, but- if you’re not a server admin/Linux pro then EC2 is not for you. Even if you don’t know a lot about hosting you can probably set up a web site using certain services, but EC2 is not one of them. Here you have to set up the server itself and then worry about setting up the applications you need. This is compounded by the fact that EC2 does not have persistent storage so you need to work with Amazon’s S3.
• Another obvious one- EC2 does not have a GUI, so you have to do everything on the command line. Developers have been writing tools, like Firefox plugins to do the basics, like initialize or reboot AMI instances, but these will not get you very far. That said, it is pretty easy to setup an instance and to start to play around with it.
• EC2 has no guarantees and limited support, so aside from some documentation and a few tutorials, you are on your own. The documentation is abundant, but none of it is amazing and almost all of it presupposes knowledge in certain areas.
• EC2 offers a trade-off of low computing costs (1.7GHz Xeon server with 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth [bursting to 1Gb] for about $75 a month) for relatively high bandwidth costs.
  
• There are alternatives to EC2. This service is very interesting but it’s not unique.
• A lot of us web guys think of EC2 only as a hosting solution, but this is not it’s only, or even it’s ideal, application. What EC2 offers is almost unlimited computing power with no setup fees, no need to buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of servers and SANs or anything like that. For example, here is an explanation of video conversion using EC2.
• The main point I have taken so far is that EC2 is not for the uninformed. If you are relying on tutorials to do the setup and you don’t know some of the basics, you will probably be able to get an AMI running and get it to do a few tasks, but you can easily get in over you head. You need to know about setting up redundancy and what will happen in case an instance crashes, because your data can easily be lost.
  

In case you are curious- I would rate my server administration skills at “just enough to be dangerous”. As in, I know the basics but am not at all a professional or even an expert. According to my own observations it seems clear that I am not up to the task of working with EC2, but I can afford to blow 10 cents/instance/hour on learning about it. I worked with EC2 on both a Windows system and a Linux one (Ubuntu 7.04) and would recommend Linux as it gave me easy access to developer tools.

For most people who are interested in hosting traditional web sites, S3 is really the more useful tool. It is only for static storage, but with some manipulation a lot can be done with it. I am going to keep in tinkering with each, but ultimately expect to be spending more time with S3.

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