Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup

Re:Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup by lelandbatey on Monday May 20, 2013 @04:24PM (#5739813)

If you where having all your data deleted when you restarted your EC2 server, then something was VERY wrong. I'm not an expert, but I've used EC2 a little bit and I think I hit that exact problem.

The thing is that for whatever reason, data wasn't being written to the EBS (the virtual hard disks for use with EC2 instances) and was instead being written to the "ephemeral storage", a really big local data store that every EC2 instance has that is basically a `/tmp` directory. If the server restarts, everything in the ephemeral storage is destroyed.

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Re:Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup by jcampbell1 on Monday May 20, 2013 @05:00PM (#5740008)

EBS is a slow turd. Running a database on EBS is running a database on network attached storage. I know tons of people do this, but I have no idea why. Provisioned IOPS will work, but it is expensive.

Local storage on a $5 Digital Ocean plan will do 2000 IOPS, where as that would cost $200/month with Amazon Provisioned IOPS. I know it is not an apples to apples comparison, but it is worth thinking about. Running a database on a local SSD is a good option for many people, and it is not an option that Amazon offers.

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Re:Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup by qflux on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @02:27AM (#5742181)

Actually there absolutely is an instance type for this. It's the high storage io instance. Not cheap, but if you want local SSD it is definitely on the menu

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