Brent Sordyl's blog

AWS: the good, the bad and the ugly | awe.sm: the blog

December 29, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

we can deploy major upgrades on new hardware.
our failure plan for some non-critical systems, where perhaps up to an hour of occasional downtime is acceptable, is to monitor the box, and if it fails, spin up a new box and restore the system from backups
we can scale up in response to load events, rather than in advance of them
we can not worry about pre-launch capacity calculations

Virtual hardware doesn’t last as long as real hardware.
You need to be in more than one zone, and redundant across zones.
Multi-zone failures happen, so if you can afford it, go multi-region too.

(Full Story: AWS: the good, the bad and the ugly | awe.sm: the blog)

aws, ec2

Deploying Ruby Applications to AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Git – AWS Ruby Blog

November 29, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

With the release of Ruby container support on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, it is now possible to deploy Rails (or any Rack-based) applications onto the AWS infrastructure in just a few easy steps. The container is backed by Amazon EC2 and automatically provisions the machines to use Phusion Passenger (with nginx under the hood). You can run your own local database with your application, or better yet, you can have Elastic Beanstalk automatically set you up with a MySQL database backed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). All of the machines sit behind a load balancer with auto-scaling support automatically configured so you don’t even have to think about ops. Scaling is built-in.

(Full Story: Deploying Ruby Applications to AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Git – AWS Ruby Blog)

aws, ec2, git, rubyonrails

aws, cloud, ec2

aws, cloud, ec2, netflix

How to Run Dynamic Cloud Tests with 800 Tomcats, Amazon EC2, Jenkins

September 23, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

At ZeroTurnaround, we need this for testing LiveRebel with larger deployments. LiveRebel is a tool to manage JEE production and QA deployments and online updates. It is crucial that we support large clusters of machines. Testing such environments is not an easy task but luckily in 2012 it is not about buying 800 machines but only provisioning them in the cloud for some limited time. In this article I will walk you through setting up a dynamic Tomcat cluster and running some simple tests on them. (Quick note: When I started writing this article, we had only tested this out with 100 Tomcat machines, but since then we grew to be able to support 800 instances with LiveRebel and the other tools).

(Full Story: How to Run Dynamic Cloud Tests with 800 Tomcats, Amazon EC2, Jenkins)

aws, ec2, testing

aws, ec2, jenkins, load, testing

How Amazon saved Zynga’s butt—and why Zynga built a cloud of its own | Ars Technica

May 25, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

For all Amazon’s scalability, the offerings can be a bit rigid. For example, you can rent an Amazon instance with a certain amount of storage and compute power, but adding a few gigabytes of memory or another processor might require buying a whole separate instance, which may have more resources than you really need.

“You can’t go to the public cloud and say I want another 64GB of memory here. They look at you and say ‘buy another instance of this type,’” Leinwand said.

Leinwand said the Amazon instance model leads to over-subscription, meaning you end up buying more storage than necessary. Internally, Zynga uses direct-attached storage striped across multiple servers, providing a big I/O performance boost and more efficient utilization, he said.

(Full Story: How Amazon saved Zynga’s butt—and why Zynga built a cloud of its own | Ars Technica)

aws, cloudcomputing, ec2

aws, cloudcomputing, ec2, privatecloud

Pinterest Architecture Update – 18 Million Visitors, 10x Growth,12 Employees, 410 TB of Data

May 25, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

80 million objects stored in S3 with 410 terabytes of user data, 10x what they had in August. EC2 instances have grown by 3x.

(Full Story: Pinterest Architecture Update – 18 Million Visitors, 10x Growth,12 Employees, 410 TB of Data)

architecture, ec2

architecture, ec2, pinterest

AT&T; Cloud Architect

February 10, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Now, complicated configurations are a thing of the past. With AT&T; Cloud Architect, there’s an automated, standardized and fast way to pick, provision and deploy servers over the web within minutes or hours, not days.

There’s no need to buy or build out your own on-premises infrastructure.

(Full Story: AT&T; Cloud Architect)

cloudcomputing, ec2

at&t;, cloudcomputing, ec2

How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse

April 25, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Spread across as many AZs as you can.
Beyond mission critical? Spread across many providers.
Build for failure.
Understand your components and how they fail.
Try to componentize your system.
Test your components.
Relax. Your stuff is gonna break

(Full Story: How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse)

amazon, aws, ec2, scalability

amazon, aws, ec2, scalability, smugmug

Deploy a Rails app to EC2 in less than an hour using Rubber

March 15, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Enter Rubber, a Capistrano/Rails plugin that promises to automate the provisioning of both vertically and horizontally scalable multi-instance EC2 deployment configurations.

(Full Story: Deploy a Rails app to EC2 in less than an hour using Rubber)

deployment, ec2, rubyonrails

How To Use Amazon EC2 as Your Desktop

January 20, 2011 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Free bandwidth to/from AWSExcellent network connectionPublic IP addressSAN-based disk storage with 3x redundancy, blazing performance, easy backupsReliable hardware with ECC RAMA restart solves all hardware problems since you get a different machine each timeTotal Monthly Charges: $26.26

(Full Story: How To Use Amazon EC2 as Your Desktop)

cloudcomputing, desktop, ec2, web2.0