Moving to Amazon Web Services

[Johnrc]

Hello,

Has anyone had any experience moving their communities to Amazon Web Services? Right now, we have a dedicated Dell server co-located in Chicago. It's got a quad-core Xeon, 8GB ram, and RAID1 15,000RPM hard drives. We're nearing the 3 year mark, and I don't want to use our machine much longer than that.

I'm interested in AWS for a few reasons: 1) High availability, 2) impossibly simple scalability, and 3) robust features, like the Cloud Front CDN. We'd likely want to use EC2 for our Linux instances, RDS for our IPS database, and S3 for our data storage.

As you would know if you've experimented with AWS, it's VERY TEDIOUS to setup...

Does anyone have any suggestions for setups? We're just pulling in under a million hits/month on our forum, so I'm looking for a powerful, yet cost effective solution.

Thanks!
John

[MGBrose]

John your dealing with a much larger userbase than I do. But I'm still very hesitant on hosting sites on the cloud for really one reason:

Price is outrageous when you compare it to dedis.

Our server cost is about ~100.00 USD per month for an unmanaged, Intel Xeon E3-1230 sandybridge (8 cores w/HT), 12gb ram, 2x 7200RPM drives (only really use them for backups with all this ram). Now in the cloud, I'd be lucky to get a 4gb chunk of ram and 2 cpu cores, for me the price for the difficulty of dealing with AWS just isn't there. I think I'd rather put money into SSD's as the next step rather than go to the cloud.

We run what I would consider a cloud setup:

High Performance Dedi: Check

High performance Tweaks (Xcache, Varnish, Memcache, Fast CGI, etc): Check

Amazon CloudFront Handling CSS/JS/Images/Downloads: Check

Cloudflare handling DNS + catching anything that isn't using CloudFront urls+ helping us with DDOS protecting: Check

I'm absolutely happy with it as well.

It sounds like your co-lo (colocation), if thats the case id squeeze every last drop out of that server until you have to purchase a new one. So if most of your traffic is guests, look at improving guest performance/reducing load by using nginx cache or varnish, the results are quite amazing, you might just need to bump your ram. Toss in a SSD and you'd probably be set! But new hardware is pretty cheap aswell.

I've looked at AWS a number of times, but we'd have to pay more to get similar performance to what we get now, on a wayyyyy under utilized server. But thats okay because were working on our next new big community.

just my $0.02

[The Nomad]

mazda626.net, 10 Years on IPBoard, 1-3 second load times world wide!

Way of subject :smile: but soon as I clicked your link the page opened instantly :thumbsup: (I'm in Spain)

[lotsen]

@MGBrose...

After clicking around your Mazda site for a few minutes I must say the page load time is pretty impressive. Good job :D

Would you mind me asking where you got your dedi? I was looking at cloud servers which I agree seems pretty expensive and has mixed reviews. My IPB is still on a test VPS for the time being.

[BikeHub]

Hello,

Has anyone had any experience moving their communities to Amazon Web Services? Right now, we have a dedicated Dell server co-located in Chicago. It's got a quad-core Xeon, 8GB ram, and RAID1 15,000RPM hard drives. We're nearing the 3 year mark, and I don't want to use our machine much longer than that.

I'm interested in AWS for a few reasons: 1) High availability, 2) impossibly simple scalability, and 3) robust features, like the Cloud Front CDN. We'd likely want to use EC2 for our Linux instances, RDS for our IPS database, and S3 for our data storage.

As you would know if you've experimented with AWS, it's VERY TEDIOUS to setup...

Does anyone have any suggestions for setups? We're just pulling in under a million hits/month on our forum, so I'm looking for a powerful, yet cost effective solution.

Thanks!
John

Hi John,

Apologies for digging up this somewhat old thread.

Also looking to make a move to AWS. Similarly using RDS for the IPS DB, EC2 instances for the web server. S3 and cloud front.

Have you made the move to AWS? If so what have your experiences been relating to IPS?

Specifically are you using auto-scaling + load balancing on the EC2 instances?
This is a key to providing flexible scalability for us allowing to scale out automatically, however I'm not settled on how to manage content across scaled instances. Any suggestions on syncing / managing the user uploads and IPS cached files between the instances?

I've seen lots of talk on using s3fs for shared file storage to maintain consistency of uploaded files and any dynamically generated files across EC2 instances. This seems like the common approach for similar setups (e.g. Wordpress media files) and may be the way to go.

Any comments or suggestions based on your experience would be much appreciated.

Many thanks,
Matt