Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Service (AWS) are a set of services hosted by Amazon that can be used to build and host your web applications at (potentially) a fraction of the cost of traditional hosting arrangements. I wont get into all the specifics of what AWS is, you can read that here. Basically, amazon setup an enormous amount of infrastructure and have services like S3 (Simple Storage Service) for remote distributed storage and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) for resizable virtual computing (hosting).
With EC2, in a nutshell, you can launch 1 or more virtual servers as if they were hosting machines that you paid a hosting provider like RackSpace for, except you don’t have to lease the actual hardware and sign year+ service contracts. You create an image of your server environment (OS, Web Server, DB, App Server, etc) and you can launch that image as many times as you need with the push of a button.
In the ideal world it all works that easy, but the fact is in order to get a reliable enterprise ready setup, there is a ton of leg work to do. That is where a company like RightScale comes in. They have a set of pre-bundled images (CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, etc) to get you up and running fast. They also provide scripts to get the proper services installed (Apache, MySQL, PHP, Java, Rails, etc). You can also write your own scripts to deploy things specific to your solution (Install Drupal, unpack and restore a DB backup, execute an SVN update, etc)
We are currently working with a client to take advantage of the real time scalability of an AWS hosted solution for a short campaign that will require an incredible amount of burstable scalability. Traffic is expected to spike exponentially for a few hours a week for a couple of months. Under a traditional hosting setup we might have to provision 6 machines to handle the surge in traffic, sign a year long contract for all of those servers, and in a few months be sitting with all of this excess hardware. With AWS, you can get an image of the server you need, dynamically deploy the instances as needed, and roll them back when you no longer need them. As to be expected, there are technical challenges too with an environment like this, but I’ll touch on those in some later posts as well as detailing the process for setting up images and instances and writing your own scripts.
Comments
Post new comment