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

[Neal McBurnett]

Good info on EBS - thanks.  That was rolled out long after I did most
of my EC2 investigation last year so I haven't tried it.

It sounds like Ubuntu images and packages should be configured to
store all persistent data in a place that is mounted from EBS.
Mounting /srv as EBS seems like the obvious choice, along with
symlinking appropriate paths to point there, like /var/www
and /usr/lib/cgi-bin/

What is the best way to use EBS to simplify security updates that
require reboots?  How early can they be mounted and how much of the
root filesystem can be EBS?  If you put /usr on EBS, how much would
the I/O request charges cost for typical usage patterns?

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett                 http://neal.mcburnett.org/

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 12:05:16PM -0800, Eric Hammond wrote:
> 
> 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
> >