Posts tagged ‘aws’
Amazon adds persistent storage to EC2 »
Amazon is adding persistent storage as an option to EC2 — currently it’s in private beta.
Previously, disk storage on an EC2 was transient:- when the machine was shut down or crashed, it felt like a hard drive crash. (And you’d lose your IP address too, but Amazon added static IPs a little while ago too.) The path to reliability was to use S3, but that can’t be mounted as a native file system.
The persistent storage appears as a raw, mountable filesystem that needs to be formatted. You’ll be able to make a quick snapshot of the data, for backup. No word on pricing or its performance, but you’d expect it to be aligned with S3.
There’s been the option of mounting S3 in EC2 using davfs, which mounts with WebDAV, but that’s a bit of a hack and one wonders what the performance would be like.
Amazon adds static IP addresses to EC2 »
This is great news: Amazon EC2 now lets you reserve static IP addresses, and allocate them to your instances. Previously, IP addresses were dynamic — if you shutdown an instance, or it crashed, the IP that it had was lost: it would go back into the general allocation pool.
This makes EC2 much more viable for running public web sites, because now you can set up a load balancer on a static IP, and not have to worry about dynamic DNS, and clients that ignore TTLs.