Ask HN: Starting up on AWS?

Re:Ask HN: Starting up on AWS? by ra on Friday April 22, 2011 @07:23AM (#2473755)

I run Django apps on AWS and two other VPS providers and I wouldn't walk away from Amazon because of this outage. Amazon have some great features that collectively aren't available as a package elsewhere.

My tip would be to host the db and app server on a single instance to start with (less things to go wrong), and assume that server will fail.

Have a warm standby either in another AWS region or (like us) with a completely different provider. And make sure you have several copies of your data available to restore if need be. (For this I use dirvish on yet another VPS provider).

Finally, test your failover / restore procedure on a fairly regular basis.

My email is in my profile. Feel free to ping me if you have any specific questions.

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Re:Ask HN: Starting up on AWS? by mainguy on Friday April 22, 2011 @08:30AM (#2473850)

You've hit on the key thing with the cloud... assume things will go wrong and accept it.

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Re:Ask HN: Starting up on AWS? by nopal on Friday April 22, 2011 @10:02AM (#2474058)

But does that mean that it's a requirement to have a second server up and running at all times (in order to be constantly receiving data from the main server)?

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Re:Ask HN: Starting up on AWS? by ra on Saturday April 23, 2011 @07:09AM (#2476643)

That depends on your tollerence to downtime and data loss. We have dirvish taking snapshots every hour, in addition to live mysql binary log replication to a hot standby server.

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