I've requirement that I want to publish a small web CMS in a CLOUD environment.
Therefore I thought since I've a AWS account and go for it, but my client does not want bear any high cost. So I'm planning to launch his website in a single small (8GB) EC2 – instance without any load balancer or any zone backup facility, but I'll launch a RDS.
My question is: So far from my AWS learning I understand that ELB is playing major role and providing vast benefit to the EC2 instance. However because of the cost reduction, the way I suggested above launching EC2 – instance without ELB will be OK? or do I take some precautions?
Best Answer
You can absolutely launch an EC2 instance without an ELB in front of it, but I would also do the following:
I have to ask, though, how cost-averse your customer really is. If you are launching an RDS instance and an EC2 instance with 8Gb memory, you are already spending in the low triple digits per month for this setup (assuming no reservations). The cost of an ELB is $0.025 per hour, or about $18 per month. The ELB provides a ton of flexibility, and because it acts as a proxy, you no longer have direct connections to your webserver from the internet.
I think you should at least present the architecture with the ELB included, and see if they flinch at the cost, and if not, go ahead and implement it.
If you cannot go with the ELB, it is also worth using Route 53 for DNS. You get some benefits there, even if you are only using it to resolve this particular webserver. If you added a second web server in the future, you can do DNS with health checks, and still have some rudimentary load balancing and/or failover.