I took a few minutes to google a few terms, like "cassandra EC2" and so forth.

I get the general impression that doing anything architecture-y or deployment-y requires amazon-specific steps, steps that I don't have to take on a barebones ubuntu install. (of the 'Do this to get Thrift working on EC2' variety)

That sucks some activation energy away.

The ease/hurdles of VMs on my dev machine, even if performance is a bit of a bear, is still more attractive to me than doing anything Amazon-specific, because it's still all just unix.

I don't want to learn "Amazon", I want to learn [puppet, Cassandra, et al].

hmm. I do cassandra on EC2 and I can't think of any ec2 specific setup that I need to do. Its just plain ubuntu. I do install my own custom cassandra to stay on top, but I would do that on any ubuntu install.

I think he's talking about making an AMI for his particular packages.

This is an issue for me to. It looks like a hassle and the instructions look vague and all I want to do is just setup a VM on my machine and then run it on amazon.

Turnkey Linux seems to make this better.

I'm guessing you're just using an off the shelf Ubuntu AMI, right?

some corroboration: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

These instances are different though, they are able to burst CPU usage, just like Linode. AFAIK, none of the other EC2 instance sizes are able to do this.

Linode doesn't "burst" CPU usage. Processor time is shared fairly among Linodes on a host, and you can use any time that isn't used by others. It's worth noting that each Linode has access to four cores, so you can go up to 400% CPU utilization. For a good idea of how Linode's CPU performance routinely exceeds that of competitors, try this review: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

Semantics. The end result is the same: there is almost always a large amount of spare CPU cycles on each physical box, which can be utilized by instances to "burst" above their allocated capacity.

It's more than semantics. The term "burst" carries the implication that you only get something for a short time. That's really not a good reflection of reality in this situation.

Who cares what term they use or what implication it has? In reality, it is the same concept. That's why it is SEMANTICS.

Words have meanings and carry implications. By your logic, we might as well use the term "banana" instead. The point is that the concept doesn't reflect reality, and thus your point has no merit.

You fuck goats. Way to take this way the fuck off topic.

You've been here a year and a half and should know better than to post comments like this one.