I'm working on a Web service which is hosted on EC2 and needs to have a varying number of instances running, depending on load. We have the basic service up and running, but one of the things we're struggling with is the time it takes to provision and launch a Windows instance (we are using some third prty tools that only run on Windows). I've seen this take anywhere from 10 minutes up to a pretty staggering 45 minutes.
Does anyone have any tips on how to speed up the launch of an EC2 instance ? Since the AMIs for Windows servers are large compared to Linux AMIs, for example, I'm wondering if one thing might be to make sure that the S3 bucket containing the AMI is located in the same zone where the instance is launched, which would presumably make provisioning the new instance faster.
Best Answer
I installed 3 instances last night of a vanilla Windows 2003 server. The first two took about 45 minutes, the 3rd, about an hour later, took a full 2 hours before it was ready!
Those had nothing in them at all, without any S3 usage. I doubt there is a way to speed up that fundamental step apart from waiting for Amazon to make deployment speed improvements over time. So, I would conclude that a certain delay is to be expected and Kurt's advice is good, which is to keep 1 or 2 in reserve already prepared.
Another thing you could do is to create a new instance of your AMI type a few times and time it. Then try a few times with your S3 storage and see how much time that adds to it. I assume that the availability zone should match between the image and S3, although I don't know how much time difference that will make.
Once you've determined the max time to provision, keep ahead of the load/usage by that many minutes.