Technical: October 2007 Archives
Amazon announced today that EC2 now offers three different server capacities. For the uninitiated, the significance of EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) is that it provides virtual computers on the Internet which one can operate via web services APIs for utility computing, and the computer can run an OS image with everything you want on it.
So you can create a Linux/Apache/PHP machine as your web server and a Linux/MySQL as your DB server, all just by clicks and API calls - and you can create as many as you want, and shut them down or boot them up any time you want. Last but not least, EC2 server images can use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage System) distributed storage.
EC2/S3 is something to watch, not only from a technology standpoint being a real, in-production, fully virtual and distributed computing environment, but also from a business standpoint. EC2/S3 creates a totally new pay-as-you-need approach to data servers, which makes it a lot more easier for startups to build their infrastructure with little money and then scale it up as they move forward.
The new server (or per EC2 terminology, image) capacities makes EC2 more flexible in terms of architecting a solution (e.g., heavy hitter machine for DB, lighter for web servers), or special applications (e.g., video processing, genetic applications).
So you can create a Linux/Apache/PHP machine as your web server and a Linux/MySQL as your DB server, all just by clicks and API calls - and you can create as many as you want, and shut them down or boot them up any time you want. Last but not least, EC2 server images can use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage System) distributed storage.
EC2/S3 is something to watch, not only from a technology standpoint being a real, in-production, fully virtual and distributed computing environment, but also from a business standpoint. EC2/S3 creates a totally new pay-as-you-need approach to data servers, which makes it a lot more easier for startups to build their infrastructure with little money and then scale it up as they move forward.
The new server (or per EC2 terminology, image) capacities makes EC2 more flexible in terms of architecting a solution (e.g., heavy hitter machine for DB, lighter for web servers), or special applications (e.g., video processing, genetic applications).
For those who are interested, Google has created a repository for course content, tools, videos, etc on their topics of interest. Specificall do not miss the video lectures on distributed computing. More about how it came about can be found here.
Amazon's CTO introduces Dynamo, a highly available and scalable distributed data store built for Amazon's
platform in a paper that he has co-authored for SOSP. Dynamo is not S3 in case you're wondering. It's an internal data store, not available to the public via web services.
The significance of the paper is the degree of high availability required for Dynamo, and how that requirement is addressed in Dynamo's architecture design. Companies like Yahoo!, Google and Amazon have to deal with failure constantly. The number of moving parts in their infrastructure is so vast that at any given time you can see disks, servers, or network devices failing. Technologies like Dynamo are built to make such failures transparent to the end uses of the system.
A PDF version of the paper is also available. It's a long paper, but a great read for anybody interested in HA and distributed systems - this is not academic stuff. It's a production system, which is rare and therefore very valuable.
The significance of the paper is the degree of high availability required for Dynamo, and how that requirement is addressed in Dynamo's architecture design. Companies like Yahoo!, Google and Amazon have to deal with failure constantly. The number of moving parts in their infrastructure is so vast that at any given time you can see disks, servers, or network devices failing. Technologies like Dynamo are built to make such failures transparent to the end uses of the system.
A PDF version of the paper is also available. It's a long paper, but a great read for anybody interested in HA and distributed systems - this is not academic stuff. It's a production system, which is rare and therefore very valuable.
