Is it a good idea to deploy your database into the cloud? It depends. I have seen it work well many times, and cause trouble at other times. In this blog post I want to examine cloud-based I/O. I/O matters a lot when a) the database’s working set is bigger than the server’s memory, or b) the workload is write-heavy. If this is the case, how expensive is it to get good performance, relative to what you get with physical hardware? Specifically, how does it compare to commodity solid-state drives? Let’s put them in the ring and let them duke it out.
I could do benchmarks, but that would not be interesting — we already know that benchmarks are unrealistic, and we know that SSDs would win. I’d rather look at real systems and see how they behave. Are the theoretical advantages of SSDs really a big advantage in practice? I will show the performance of two real customer systems running web applications.

First and foremost, and this can’t be said nearly enough for all those people jumping on EC2 because it’s flexible, EC2 instances are ephemeral. That means they can and do disappear at random. If there is a hardware failure in the physical node that hosts your instance it will simply disappear, along with any data that isn’t on an EBS device; you’re supposed to account for these types of things in your application design.

That means either some kind of heartbeat / load balanced setup1 where a server that disappears is automatically removed from the rotation or some other kind of monitoring, possibly a similar heartbeat system that uses that API to immediately spin up a replacement for the missing instance2.

Installing ThinkUp on Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to get started with ThinkUp. The entire thing can be done in a web browser, start to finish, in about ten minutes. No downloads, installations, or commandline knowledge required. Plus, Amazon's Micro instances (their smallest available server) are free for a year for new Amazon Web Services users, and a little over $5/year for everyone else.

Here's a step-by-step walkthrough, using Amazon's Web Services Dashboard to create and configure a new instance running the latest version of Ubuntu and ThinkUp.

To help new AWS customers get started in the cloud, AWS is introducing a new free usage tier. Beginning November 1, new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer. AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.

Pantheon means ‘a group of gods’. Linux, Apache, MySQL, Drupal, Varnish, Hudson, Aegir, these Open Source projects are technology titans for web development. The Pantheon project packages them together seamlessly in machine instances instantly available on Amazon EC2.