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Archive for the ‘Cluster Architecture’ Category

Automatically scaling a LAMP application in the cloud

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

http://www.lindstromconsulting.com/node/8

In the previous article on the subject of cloud computing using AWS, we setup a simple LAMP application that used a single web server to present data that was queried from a single RDS instance. In this guide we will see how to save the changes we made to the EC2 instance, create more EC2 instances, and setup load balancing across our web servers.

Heroku learns the hard way from Amazon EC2 outage

Monday, January 11th, 2010

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid201_gci1378426,00.html?track=NL-1329&ad=743755&asrc=EM_NLN_10614277&uid=1914599#


Teich also said that all of Heroku’s m2.2xlarge instances were running in a single availability zone, which was a mistake. He stressed that Heroku had failover built in already — if 21 instances had failed instead of 22, or if it had spread instances across several zones, “we wouldn’t be talking [about the outage],” he said.

Nevertheless, on Friday, January 2, every m2.2xlarge instance in that availability zone suddenly vanished, despite all other types of EC2 instances running as normal. That’s unheard of in traditional hosting. It would be like every server with a given amount of RAM suddenly shutting down, regardless of operating system, age, brand, hardware or location in the data center, with no effect on its neighbors.

“For us, there’s the stuff you plan for and then there’s the stuff you don’t even know about,” Teich said.

An event like this was an “unknown unknown” that nobody planned for because nobody imagined it. He chalked it up to the learning process and pointed out that everybody in Amazon Web Services was flying by the seat of the pants at least part of the time.

HN thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1046500

HowTo update DNS hostnames automatically for your Amazon EC2 instances

Monday, January 11th, 2010

http://www.ducea.com/2009/06/01/howto-update-dns-hostnames-automatically-for-your-amazon-ec2-instances/

A while ago one of the major problems people faced to use Amazon EC2 into production environments was the dynamic state of the instances IPs. Every time one instance was started it was getting a new, dynamic IP. This has been addressed with the introduction of Amazon Elastic IP Addresses, but even when using this, the private IPs are still dynamic and most of the time people will want to communicate between several instances on the private allocated IPs and not on the public ones. This article will show how you can easily automate the process to update DNS hostnames for your EC2 instances, by adding to the AMI’s the logic for this. I will use for this a master DNS server running bind9, but this can be adapted to any other DNS server.

Amazon EC2 Instance Types

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

http://www.powercram.com/2010/01/amazon-ec2-instance-types.html

Amazon EC2 Instance Types.
Standard Instances
Instances of this family are well suited for most applications …

Setting up Erlang on Amazon EC2

Friday, January 1st, 2010

http://wagerlabs.com/setting-up-erlang-on-amazon-ec2


Amazon does not provide tools to cluster your instances or replicate data among them. This is a task that Erlang copes with extremely well so Amazon EC2 and Erlang are a match made in haven!

More: http://wagerlabs.com/tag/ec2

Best Practices for using Elastic IPs (EIP) and Availability Zones

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

http://support.rightscale.com/09-Clouds/AWS/02-Amazon_EC2/Designing_Failover_Architectures_on_EC2/00-Best_Practices_for_using_Elastic_IPs_%28EIP%29_and_Availability_Zones

As cloud computing continues to evolve many questions arise around the best way to design a highly reliable site on the cloud with failover and recovery. As a system administrator you must always plan for failure. This document will help explain the best way to create affordable and reliable sites on EC2 using Elastic IPs (EIP) and availability zones.

Amazon EC2 – Fedora/Linux Startup Guide

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

http://blog.shutupandcode.net/?p=374

Solr, Zabbix, Selenium

RAID and LVM on Amazon EC2 (part I)

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

http://debianzone.org/raid-and-lvm-on-amazon-ec2-part-i/

This is the first part of three articles I’m posting for a great storage solution using RAID, LVM and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS).

First, you need to choose your RAID implementation. Personally, I prefer to use RAID 5 on Amazon EC2, combined with LVM2.

Creating an EBS-backed AMI from an S3-backed AMI

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

http://www.elastician.com/2009/12/creating-ebs-backed-ami-from-s3-backed.html


The recent introduction of Boot From EBS for EC2 opens up a lot of new possibilities. But there are some bootstrapping issues to deal with. There aren’t many EBS-backed AMI’s available yet and, given the rather complex process involved in porting them, it may take a while for them to show up. This article will walk through the process of converting a popular S3-based AMI to an EBS-backed AMI.

Scaling (Down) with AWS

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

http://wi.nr/4G

Launching a new webapp is never easy – even one as simple as a URL shortener. Will it catch on? If it does, what does that mean in terms of traffic? 10, 100, 1000 requests per second?

A few weeks ago we did some back of the envelope calculations for how big wi.nr could get in the best case. The calculation went something like: 10,000 active users x 10 shortened URLs per day x 100 people clicking on each of those URLs = 10M shortened URLs clicked a day or ~120 per sec.

StarCluster

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

http://web.mit.edu/stardev/cluster/


Multiple Clusters – Currently, StarCluster only supports launching a single cluster on ec2. In theory, the software should be able to START multiple clusters but it’s not equipped to handle the accounting on which nodes belong to which cluster after the initial startup. This means things like listing the nodes, terminating a particular cluster, etc will not work. Support for the correct account of multiple clusters should come in future versions.

Dynamic Load Balancing – Support for a dynamically resizing cluster on ec2. Integrating the Service Domain Manager (SDM) and Hedeby software products from SUN into the AMI will allow ec2 nodes to easily be added to the Sun Grid Engine queue. This means you could theoretically start a single node cluster and as the load increases, ec2 nodes would be launched, added to the cluster, used for computation, and then removed when they’re idle. The impact of this would be to significantly lower the cost of using EC2 by only having one node up 24/7 and adding/removing nodes as needed.

Preparing For EC2 Persistent Storage

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

http://docs.google.com/View?docID=dhh4z6n4_96w387mqhn&revision=_latest

Using LVM + DRBD + NFS + Heartbeat + VTun To Gain Data Persistence, Redundancy, Automatic Fail-Over, and Read/Write Disk Access Across Multiple EC2 Nodes