Finally! A quick, easy persistent storage for our EC2 instances…
We are pleased to announce the release of a significant new Amazon EC2 feature, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), which provides persistent storage for your Amazon EC2 instances. With Amazon EBS, storage volumes can be programmatically created, attached to Amazon EC2 instances, and if even more durability is desired, can be backed with a snapshot to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Prior to Amazon EBS, block storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself so that when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. Now with Amazon EBS, users can chose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes can be created in any size between 1 GB and 1 TB, and multiple volumes can be attached to a single instance. Additionally, for even more durable backups and an easy way to create new volumes, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time, consistent snapshots of volumes that are then stored to Amazon S3.
Amazon EBS is well suited for databases, as well as many other applications that require running a file system or access to raw block-level storage. As Amazon EC2 instances are started and stopped, the information saved in your database or application is preserved in much the same way it is with traditional physical servers. Amazon EBS can be accessed through the latest Amazon EC2 APIs, and is now available in public beta.
For more information on Amazon EBS and detail on how to start using this feature, please see the resources listed below:
Posted by David Ehlers at 8:03 am on August 21st, 2008. No comments... »
Categories: server. Tags: amazon, ebs, ec2, server.
This is the main issue I currently have with Amazon’s EC2: the lack of persistent storage. However, according to this press release,
“This new feature provides reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. These volumes exist independently from any Amazon EC2 instances, and will behave like raw, unformatted hard drives or block devices, which may then be formatted and configured based on the needs of your application. The volumes will be significantly more durable than the local disks within an Amazon EC2 instance. Additionally, our persistent storage feature will enable you to automatically create snapshots of your volumes and back them up to Amazon S3 for even greater reliability.”
Here’s the thread
Posted by David Ehlers at 8:31 am on May 6th, 2008. No comments... »
Categories: server. Tags: amazon, aws, ec2.
I’m currently evaluating this service, after using some of the other amazon services such as s3, this looks super sexy in a techy way. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios
Heck, create a drupal site on EC2 with a single line: ec2-run-instances ami-4c7b9e25 -k gsg-keypair
and for us Mac OSX users, here’s a getting started on ec2
Amazon’s Getting Started Guide
Posted by David Ehlers at 6:45 pm on April 29th, 2008. No comments... »
Categories: server. Tags: amazon, ec2, Linux, web server.
