10 Things You Should Know About AWS. Authored by Chris Fregly: Former Netflix Streaming Platform Engineer, AWS Certified Solution Architect and Purveyor of fluxcapacitor.com.
Ahead of the upcoming 2nd annual re:Invent conference, inspired by Simone Brunozzi’s recent presentation at an AWS Meetup in San Francisco, and collected from a few of my recent Fluxcapacitor.com consulting engagements, I’ve compiled a list of 10 useful time and clock-tick saving tips about AWS. 1) Query AWS resource metadata Can’t remember the EBS-Optimized IO throughput of your c1.xlarge cluster? How about the size limit of an S3 object on a single PUT? Awsnow.info is the answer to all of your AWS-resource metadata questions. Note: These are default soft limits and will vary by account. 2) Tame your S3 buckets Delete an entire S3 bucket with a single CLI command: aws s3 rb --force Recursively copy a local directory to S3: aws s3 cp <local-dir-name> --region <region-name> --recursive 3) Understand AWS cross-region dependencies 4) Use ZFS with EBS.
Software Engineering & Development. The Lure You’re a new startup, you’re tight on funds and don’t have the server knowledge to run your own servers, but you plan on growing exponentially very quickly.
You have three choices: Suck it up and learn some sysadmin skills (or hire one)Use a PaaS provider (such as EngineYard, Heroku, or EC2)Use a mix of both But how do you know which path to take? I’ll be using my experience running Servly for most of this article. How valuable is your time when shit hits the fan? When using services like EC2 and Amazon, you need to be aware that the support levels are different versus a regular dedicated hosting provider. Support with a dedicated server is different.
There are other considerations to make as well. With dedicated hardware you can control your infastructure in a much more fine grained way than with a PaaS offering. Benchmark like crazy Besides knowing how your application’s innards look you also need to know how it performs. Liquid error: No such file or directory - posix_spawnp [1] Instagram Architecture: 14 Million users, Terabytes of Photos, 100s of Instances, Dozens of Technologies. Instagram is a free photo sharing and social networking service for your iPhone that has been an instant success.
Growing to 14 million users in just over a year, they reached 150 million photos in August while amassing several terabytes of photos, and they did this with just 3 Instaneers, all on the Amazon stack. The Instagram team has written up what can be considered the canonical description of an early stage startup in this era: What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies.
Instagram uses a pastiche of different technologies and strategies. We'll just tl;dr the article here, it's very well written and to the point. Definitely worth reading. Lessons learned: 1) Keep it very simple 2) Don’t re-invent the wheel 3) Go with proven and solid technologies when you can.3 Engineers.Amazon shop.
Here are a few reasons why *not* to use the cloud. Feel free to add your own. We just published a little article on reasons why you might want to avoid the cloud.
Cloud computing becomes clown computing when you're using it for no good reason. You can read the article *here* but it would be easier if we just summarized it: Some reasons not to use the cloud:i. When your Internet connection is slow and not reliable. The cloud requires high speed and reliable connection to the service provider’s servers and the absence of good connection will lead to bad experience of working on cloud.ii. Add your own.