We are looking into moving our website to Amazon EC2.
The basic idea behind Amazon's cloud seems to be: "Need more RAM? You got it. Hard disk? Sure, here you go." Etc.
But Amazon seems to be pushing the instance count, rather instance parameters (RAM, disk, etc) as the way their scaling works.
"Amazon EC2 provides a truly elastic computing environment. Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. " http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_quickly_can_I_scale_my_capacity_both_up_and_down
So, again, if my website is running on a single instance and that instance starts to bump up against some limit, how is a second instance going to help?
Do they automatically: share the same ip address, perform load balancing, synchronize write data?
Or am I misunderstanding something?
Thank you.
Best Answer
With EC2 you can (to some extent) scale both horizontally (adding more instances) and vertically (going to a larger instance) - however, the latter cannot be done automatically.
Almost nothing is inherently shared between instances - they run their own operating systems, have their own memory, and their own storage, and own IPs. Treat them as you would any VPS - just with a bit more automated provisioning system.
One place where EC2 differs from most VPS solutions is in the ability to add storage. This can be done without stopping the instance, in the form of 'adding new volumes' (so you would have, for example, /dev/xvda, and then add /dev/xvdb, etc.)
You can go to a larger instance via the following: Stop (not terminate) the instance Use ec2-modify-instance-attribute i-xxxxxx -t to change the instance type Start the instance
For all other aspects of scalability, you are on your own - you have to design your application to make use of what Amazon provides: Elastic IPs - to provide a single constant public IP despite changing the underlying instance Elastic Load Balancers - to distribute requests between the instances EBS volumes - for persistent storage EC2 instances - for computing power S3 & Cloudfront - for content delivery RDS - for MySQL databases managed by AWS (there is no built in scalability though)
AWS definitely doesn't do everything for you - it is not an automatic solution to take any application and instantly let it scale, but it does provide a framework on which you can build an application that will easily scale.
You can provision additional servers at will - either identical to existing ones, or different from them, and AWS will increase/decrease the number of instances on a number of metrics (e.g. load) if you want.
You can build arrays of disks, setup network file systems, network your instances together (VPC), and perform pretty much any function that would be necessary to build a scalable architecture.
At least in part the underlying reason for the setup on AWS is because each 'instance' is a predefined virtual machine. To modify the specs of a virtual machine would require you to stop and start it anyway. Amazon has provided a large assortment of instance types, to choose from, but beyond that, you cannot customize the CPU/RAM of an instance-type. Additionally, horizontal scaling overcomes the limitation of a single machine (for instance, it would be unimaginable for any large site to run on one server, no matter how large) - and avoids single points of failures. Arguably, if you need more power than is offered by their largest instances, horizontal scaling would likely end up as your solution, whether or not you ran on AWS.