"A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed to be particularly reliable."
Source?
An AWS instance is simply an OS running on a virtualf (xen?) machine. On the largest instances you may in fact be the only virtual machine on the physical hardware.
Why would you feel more comfortable running a single instance outside of AWS? Your safety is just an illusion. Your MTTR is out the window. When you go down, youll have an outage that goes like this: "we'll be back in a day or two when I order new hardware and drive it to the colo. Also, the database will be time warping to the last backuP 24 hours ago."
Running on a single machine is never safe and AWS is cheap enough and comes with enough tools (ELB, RDS, maybe EBS) to allow you to become truly redundant and single fault tolerant.
> "A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed > to be particularly reliable."
> Source?
Reading the AWS EC2 forums for any length of time or launching your own EC2 instances into production and watching them fall over from time to time.
All arbitrary, but I don't think anyone that has deployed on EC2 with more than a handful of servers would ever describe it as an overly stable service.
> Why would you feel more comfortable running a single instance outside of AWS? Your safety is just an illusion.
In theory, absolutely agree. It sounds like you were agreeing with the OP to be honest, but just getting pedantic about single-AWS instance vs single-dedicated instance in another hosting company.
Sure, best practices dictate trusting a single point of failure is not a good idea.
In practice, my dedicated deployments (at RimuHosting if that matters) are infinitely more stable than my EC2 deployments and I think that data point is worth something -- not going to bet the farm on it, but I'm also not going to treat my dedicated servers like I would flaky EC2 VMs.
> Running on a single machine is never safe and AWS is cheap enough and comes with enough tools (ELB, RDS, maybe EBS) to allow you to become truly redundant and single fault tolerant.
You are agreeing with the EwanToo from what I can tell...
AWS seems really stable to me. Hundreds of days of uptime are the norm, if the instances even run that long.
However, there IS a pretty huge gap that exists between managed colocation and EC2. There are dedicated servers that can be ready in an hour or so, cloud-like baremetal "instant" provisioners, and über-VPS providers like Linode and Rackspace Cloud.
Source?
An AWS instance is simply an OS running on a virtualf (xen?) machine. On the largest instances you may in fact be the only virtual machine on the physical hardware.
Why would you feel more comfortable running a single instance outside of AWS? Your safety is just an illusion. Your MTTR is out the window. When you go down, youll have an outage that goes like this: "we'll be back in a day or two when I order new hardware and drive it to the colo. Also, the database will be time warping to the last backuP 24 hours ago."
Running on a single machine is never safe and AWS is cheap enough and comes with enough tools (ELB, RDS, maybe EBS) to allow you to become truly redundant and single fault tolerant.