Amazon Cloud Computing

[RoyMi6]

I'm looking at amazon cloud storage and computing.

Looking to host a small ASP.Net application that's likely to get a lot of traffic.

Anyone used their Amazon EC2 service before? Easy to setup? Any different from regular .Net hosting? Any pitfalls to look out for?

Roy

 

[Stelly]

Personally if you are doing a small asp.net application why not try Microsoft Azure hosting? I use their SQL hosting and its really great.

Stelly

 

[RoyMi6]

The decision is kind of out of my hands but I'll have a look into it.

They already have a sister site sitting on AWS so figure it will be easier maintenance for them long run.

EDIT: Actually, looks like EC2 provides a management interface that allows the creation of virtual machines etc. I thought you just bought "one" virtual machine - didn't realise you were getting access to a whole VM control panel as such.

 

[aln]

The decision is kind of out of my hands but I'll have a look into it.

They already have a sister site sitting on AWS so figure it will be easier maintenance for them long run.

EDIT: Actually, looks like EC2 provides a management interface that allows the creation of virtual machines etc. I thought you just bought "one" virtual machine - didn't realise you were getting access to a whole VM control panel as such.

It's not really a cloud infrastructure unless you have access to various APIs which let you, with some effort, achieve automatic scaling. This is the difference from clouds and VPSs (from a hosting vm's point of view).

 

[NathanE]

To be honest it's not really appropriate to host a "small ASP.NET website" on a EC2 or even an Azure VM instance. Sure, it's "cloud" but it still means you've only got one server to host it.

I don't know about AWS on this but Azure has the concept of "Web Sites" which lets you host it in a load balanced server farm. Your site will literally never go down.

 

[Redrum]

There are a few different types of cloud computing.

I don't know about AWS on this but Azure has the concept of "Web Sites" which lets you host it in a load balanced server farm. Your site will literally never go down.

I don't know about Azure, but that sounds like Platform as a Service. AWS is Infrastructure as a Service.

That means you have access to infrastructure (servers, load balancers etc.) on demand. But you are responsible for all software on the servers, including the operating system. The hardware is taken care of by Amazon, and you can start and stop servers when you want, provision and attach disks in a matter of minutes with a few clicks and back them up instantly whenever you want.

But although the hardware is taken care of by Amazon, the servers can and do fail, and when this happens, it's mostly down to you, not Amazon, to fix things. You can choose which zone to start a server in, and each zone is in a different data centre, so to make it reliable, you need your application hosted by multiple servers in multiple zones.

As NathanE said, it's not really designed for a single small site.

 

[Maccy]

EC2 is easy to set up, you should be able to get it free if you're below the usage tier.

 

[SMN]

AWS is great; and if you want you can use RDS for remote DB hosting.