Apple

Sounds great Simon.

I have a database of about 35GB of data running on an 8GB PowerPC G5 today in one of my active projects and we have preliminary plans under way to upgrade our DB server to a 32GB Linux RAID unit. What is the biggest RDS memory size instance that you have used, and what is the perception of performance gains, if any, over traditional self or colo hosting?

I notice they support SSL connections also to MySQL. Do you use SSL between the EC2 app instance and the RDS instance - or is that overkill considering that I have sensitive data (credit card numbers, etc) encrypted in the database fields anyway? If you do use SSL connections between app and db, have you noticed much latency?

You said you have availed of the different zone replication/failover feature - from reading the FAQs, it appears that this is different to traditional master-slave replication - are they executing the SQL in parallel on both the master and failover RDS instances to give true mirroring, or am I reading this wrong? Have you noticed latency impact due to this configuration (the online info suggests that there is some latency)?

Regards, Kieran

On Aug 2, 2010, at 1:38 PM, Simon wrote:

How does session management work with the elastic load balancer? For example if you have 3 independent EC2 instances all running the same app?

if you are not using https then amazon provide a couple of cookie-based mechanisms for session stickiness. if you are using https then you can use the elb to send initial requests to one of your instances, then the user communicates with that specific instance directly. there is no ssl-termination available with elb, but the amazon lists suggest this is coming. once they have this ssl load balancing will be a lot more elegant.

Also, do you completely trust RDS to make sure your data is never lost? Is there any need for you to have a physical server replicating from RDS? Is there any risk that one day, amazon loses your database and says "Sorry, but we assume you have your own backup"?

in short, yes, i completely trust it. we've been running it in production for 9 months now without a single glitch. we use their multi-avail support and we've done test failovers which happen flawlessly in minutes. how long would it take you to (a) make a decision to fail over your master to a slave and (b) physically carry out the failover and (c) physically restore the master once things are sorted out ? the automation here alone makes it a much more powerful solution than running it ourselves.

and how often do you test restoring from your backups ? officially we used to do it once a month, but it was always a real drag... now we routinely restore databases - sometimes several times a day - and use them to test code against because it's 2 clicks, make a cup of tea, and you've got a fully functioning snapshot of production from 5 minutes ago.

do we ever take "normal" backups ? yes, but very very rarely, and not for date protection - we do them purely to get a fresher copy on our laptops for offline use.

Simon

-Kieran

On Jul 27, 2010, at 1:16 PM, Simon wrote:

doing what you've done means you're managing mysql, looking after it, making sure it doesn't fall over, doing backups, managing replication etc. rds does all of that for you. it also makes changing the config of your database server a breeze: need more disk space ? couple of clicks. need more ram ? couple of clicks. need more compute power behind it ? couple of clicks. need automatic fail-over to a different availability zone ? couple of clicks.

re web server resources, remember it's just a normal wo deployment running in the cloud, so you can do whatever you do now.

we don't separate the web and app tier - all our ec2 instances run monitor, wotaskd and apache, and are effectively independent of each other, and we use an elastic load balancer up front.

simon

On 27 July 2010 17:40, James Cicenia <email@hidden> wrote:

So the base image is the actual OS? So you are managing it as the admin?

I decided to try WOlastic. I configured the instances, setup up mysql with my users and sync'd the database from existing production to amazon.
So you are suggesting RDS vs. what I just did? What are the benefits of RDS? Amazon backs up the mysql I created.

Now I am a bit stumped on WebServerResources. How are you handling that?

Well, if this works well, I can my webobject apps over and then just sell my server and drop the colo.

- James

On Jul 27, 2010, at 11:28 AM, Simon wrote:

rolling your own is surprisingly easy if you start with a base image. we started out with a vanilla centos image from rightscale, and have built it up into what we needed from there. you can then create an ebs-backed ami in a couple of clicks.

re pricing, it all depends on what you need. our financial models tell us for our deployment is excellent value for money, and we can scale well beyond our current needs and it remains as such. use the cost aws calculator to figure out your own costs, and remember to factor in staff costs in your decision making process. those DBA's are darn expensive compared to RDS :-)

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

the only performance issue we found is that it is basically impossible to host your DB outside of amazon due to latency. but you don't have to use RDS - if you like sticking needles in your eyes you can just run and look after your own mysql / postgre / mssql / whatever on an ec2 instance.

the general performance of our apps has also vastly improved. a mixture of using more computing power and amazon having much faster internet transit than we were paying for in our previous co-lo.

alongside production we also run our staging servers and our hudson build server on ec2. in productivity terms running hudson there was a huge leap forward: previously a new build would take around 30 minutes to upload to staging / production. now it takes 19 seconds flat :-)

we're shortly going to move our subversion repository to ec2 as well.

Simon

On 27 July 2010 15:13, James Cicenia <email@hidden> wrote:

This is very cool.

I need to move one of my servers, or, use the cloud approach for its WOApps. I see you rolled your own but wolastic seems like it is for a mere mortal.

Anyone use wolastic? What is the pricing your are seeing? Issues? Performances? Etc.

Thanks.
James Cicenia

On Jul 26, 2010, at 3:55 PM, Simon wrote:

we don't use the wolastic images (we have our own) but we do deploy entirely on the amazon ec2 cloud now. ec2 instances running standard javamonitor / wotaskd, amazon RDS for database server, s3 for file storage etc. scalability on demand, load balancing, redundancy across multiple availability zones. it's the best thing since sliced bread...

our staging servers (also on ec2) run wonders javamonitor / wotasd and hence we'll probably upgrade our production servers to those soon.

simon

On 26 July 2010 21:36, Ramsey Gurley <email@hidden> wrote:
I haven't tried it yet, but WOlastic looks like a *really* cool deployment solution for WO.

http://wolastic.com/

Ramsey

On Jul 26, 2010, at 4:27 PM, Ken Anderson wrote:

Thanks for the thoughts guys!

Ken

On Jul 26, 2010, at 1:42 PM, Pascal Robert wrote:

Le 2010-07-26 à 12:55, Chuck Hill a écrit :

On Jul 26, 2010, at 9:44 AM, Ken Anderson wrote:

I've been asked to comment on the best way to deploy WebObjects today without any "imposed" restrictions. I haven't done any new deployments in a long while, so I'm likely not up to date on the last. What are people using today, and why do they think it's the best?

Thanks much!
Ken

Lacking imposed restrictions (e.g. must run in J2EE container), traditional WO deployment through Apache with mod_webobjects is probably the way to go. Anjo was working on mod_proxy deployment, but I don't recall how far he got or if he has this in production. It looked promising. There is also a Fast CGI adaptor and Ravi is working on something for WOWODC.

I'm adding some mods in JavaMonitor too (for WOWODC) and Andrew Lindesay also have stuff in LEWOStuff to use mod_proxy_ajp.

----
Pascal Robert
email@hidden

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References:
	>Re: Suggestions for best deployment? (From: Kieran Kelleher <email@hidden>)
	>Re: Suggestions for best deployment? (From: Simon <email@hidden>)
	>Re: Suggestions for best deployment? (From: Kieran Kelleher <email@hidden>)