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Re:Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - persistent storage by dabeeeenster on Thursday August 21, 2008 @04:25AM (#282470)
This is the final piece of the puzzle, following on from persistent IP addresses, in terms of using EC2 as a web server platform.

Time to get tinkering!

A shame Amazon dont have a data centre in Europe for European firms, in terms of reducing latency...

Re:Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - persistent storage by ovi256 on Thursday August 21, 2008 @06:46AM (#282523)
They do have an S3 datacenter in Europe. Source: aws.amazon.com/s3

Could be mighty useful as a CDN.

Re:Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - persistent storage by falsestprophet on Thursday August 21, 2008 @02:41PM (#282998)
It is useful as a media server, but a CDN is a lot more.

"CDN nodes are deployed in multiple locations, often over multiple backbones. These nodes cooperate with each other to satisfy requests for content by end users, transparently moving content to optimize the delivery process. Optimization can take the form of reducing bandwidth costs, improving end-user performance, or increasing global availability of content.

The number of nodes and servers making up a CDN varies, depending on the architecture, some reaching thousands of nodes with tens of thousands of servers.

Requests for content are algorithmically directed to nodes that are optimal in some way. When optimizing for performance, locations that are best for serving content to the user may be chosen. This may be measured by choosing locations that are the fewest hops or fewest number of network seconds away from the requesting client, so as to optimize delivery across local networks. When optimizing for cost, locations that are least expensive may be chosen instead. Often these two goals tend to align, as servers that are close to the end user sometimes have an advantage in serving costs, perhaps because they are located within the same network as the end user. However the value of a CDN is often demonstrated when these two goals do not align i.e. when the best performing servers and network route is located in the furthest geographic distance."

Re:Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - persistent storage by streety on Thursday August 21, 2008 @09:06AM (#282613)
There might be an opportunity here. The facilities of flexiscale and amazon EC2/EBS are now comparable. A service that sat on top of the two and offered geographical redundancy could be a real winner.