[ec2-beta] Instances show no console output, do not respond?

[Eric Hammond]

EBS is a fantastic feature and in my opinion is by itself a reason to 
move services to Amazon EC2.

I wrote a tutorial for Amazon describing one way to use EBS for hosting 
a MySQL database:

   http://ec2ebs-mysql.notlong.com

I need to update the tutorial so that it works with the official Ubuntu 
beta AMIs since the approach I originally described does not work with 
the default AppArmor configuration.


Minor clarification on performance:

The current general consensus based on lots of different performance 
tests and statements from Amazon seems to be that EBS generally performs 
better than ephemeral (local) storage for random IO especially when you 
RAID multiple EBS volumes together.  At this level you would be using a 
large or xlarge instance for more network capacity.

Ephemeral storage generally performs better than EBS for large 
sequential IO, especially after the initial write penalty has been paid 
(first write to a block on the instance takes longer than subsequent 
writes).

It is also possible to RAID ephemeral partitions for better local 
performance if you don't need the persistence of EBS or want to pay the 
additional cost.

--
Eric Hammond
ehammond at thinksome.com



Michael Jensen wrote:
> 
> Neal McBurnett wrote:
>  >> PSS: Can you have persistant instances? it seams my instances
>>> dissapear after i shut them down, so if i were to build a server would
>>> i just loose everything each time? (wouldnt think thats the case).
>> This is a big surprise for most users.  No - you don't get any
>> persistence of the disk (or ram of course).  The way to get data
>> persistence is to use external storage like Amazon's S3 service,
>> or your own networked database.
> 
> You actually can use Amazon's Elastic Block Store for persistent storage
> http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/
> Aside from the awesome snapshot feature, the disk performance is better
> than the "local" disks in EC2 instances.
> http://altj.org/content/performance-increase-amazons-ebs-persistent-storage
> 
> 
> Michael
>