Heard about Amazon Web Services new offering? Here is a quick rundown…
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Looks pretty cool, yet it doesn’t look it can be used with Microsoft/ASP.NET technologies. However for all you LAMP people out there, this could be a great way to save money if you have to have multiple web and database servers handling your traffic loads.
I like the term “elastic” computing. Until this I only thought of one-way scaling – i.e. Keep adding more servers to accommodate handle (peak) demand. So there is a lot of unused bandwidth that you’re still paying for. The problem there is — it’s logistically complicated to manually to downscale your server when it isn’t busy. EC2 can combat this, sure it would take some smart programming and some heavy testing, but you could trim the belt on your web hosting costs.
How? EC2 is a web service. This means any developer can come up with their own way of using it. A smart developer could design their busy web applications to manage itself and add or remove nodes in the web farm. Two ideas that came to me were the following.
Scheduled scaling — You know when your website gets busy, and when it peaks. You could build a schedule for how many nodes in your web farm will be needed to accommodate the peak hours and then scale back for you off hours. Who could use this method? Monster.com and how about Digg.com? I think it’s safe to say most major websites have busy times and slow times. If there are trends in usage you could take advantage of that and cut back during the slow times. What about the ones that don’t have predictable slow times?
Just-In-Time (JIT) scaling – Having a self-diagnosing web application could let you react to sudden conditions and add or kill nodes in your web farm. Simple as that! Who could use this? YouTube.com – they must have a high yet random server load, using a just-in-time model could trim the costs of their already gigantic monthly bill.
So that’s all I got! Too bad I can’t move any of my ASP.net applications there right now – as I’m currently shopping for a new hosting solution. Personally I think the current web hosting model is broken — could this be the future of all webhosts? I hope Microsoft creates a Windows 2003 clustering system similar to this, think Virtual Server 2005 on steroids:)
Are you looking for ways to generate more revenue or reduce costs of your website? Give me a call and we can brainstorm some solutions your problems!
