NYCPHP Meetup

[Rob Marscher]

> On Jun 6, 2008, at 1:14 PM, Max Gribov wrote:

>>   does anyone have any experience with amazon ec2 cloud?..
>>   It sounds cheap and like the next best thing since sliced bread..  
>> Has anyone tried this beyond a dev environment?

On Jun 6, 2008, at 9:21 PM, Larry Ludwig wrote:
> A few customers have asked this same question to our service.  Hans  
> Z brings up all great issues:  I have posted a blog discussing some  
> of their deficiencies:  http://www.empoweringmedia.com/blog/archives/21

Yeah... I was just talking about this with Larry.  I'm also not  
convinced EC2 is the best thing for hosting pubic web applications at  
this time.  There are hosting companies out there like Larry's that  
provide Xen virtual servers which have a lot of the same advantages as  
EC2 instances, but at a lower monthly cost.

EC2 seems a bit more appropriate for batch and parallel computing in  
short bursts.  For example, anytime you upload a video to S3... you  
could fire up an EC2 instance with an image that has software to  
convert the video into multiple formats/sizes and then place the  
results back on S3 (there's the Amazon SQS service to assist with  
batch processing).  If you don't upload any videos for 10 days, you  
don't have to pay anything.  If you upload 20 videos at once, you  
could potentially start 20 EC2 instances and get the whole job done  
very quickly (20 is the default max for an account... you can raise  
your limit via a special request).

Then there's the stuff that NYTimes has been doing with EC2.  Pretty  
cool:
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/self-service-prorated-super-computing-fun/
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/the-new-york-times-archives-amazon-web-services-timesmachine/

-Rob