A lightning strike causes EC2 outages and Om Malik blames the “fragility of the cloud,” rather than recognizing that all tech suffers failures. I’ll say it again, this could have happened to my own servers, or my own data center, and I would have been much further up the creek than if Amazon team was taking care of it. Besides, one of the most important lessons I have learned from working with AWS is that servers/services should fail, and fail gracefully. It shouldn’t matter whether that service is “in the cloud” or in your data center.
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Grig Gheorghiu wrote up a nice article on handling high traffic sites on EC2. It’s definitely worth a read for some high-level concepts about multi-tier architectures. It doesn’t talk deeply on details of EC2 (would have liked to see something mentioned about availability zones for MySQL and load balancers). One thing I really liked was the concept of using multiple load balancers with round-robin DNS pointing at them. I’ve been considering this as an option and have played around with HAProxy already. It’s likely a future step for our new image service at CafeMom.
Ylastic is putting a management interface for AWS on the iPhone. Looks pretty cool.
I am familiar with their name, but don’t have any experience with their product. I sort of wish these sorts of tools could be open sourced (and there are some) so that I could run the management service on my own servers and not hand over my AWS keys. Like I said, I don’t have experience with their product, so maybe I’m making an assumption there.
As I’ve said earlier about AWS, it’s an amazing service, but is very much like a raw material. It’s like having someone hand you the keys to a datacenter, and you don’t even know how to turn on the lights. Ylastic fits into the category of management vendors for AWS, and I think that Amazon’s ultimate success will depend on management vendors who extend the web services to the layperson.
