Sort out my EC2 hosting

 Triviality  No Responses »
Dec 132012
 

After last time fire sale I have 3 micro instances running on EC2, one in east coast and two in west. I got a mail the other day, saying my free tier is expiring so I need to make decision if I need to keep it running or not.

It did take me quite some time to figure our which one is free tier, which one is the reserved instance and which one is the left – I have to blame myself as it’s me who made the configuration this messy. Anyway, it seems my major site is running on the free tier (w1), and my reseved instance is actually idle (w2), and the secondary site is on a pay-as-you-go instance (w3).

Anyway, since the free tire will be expired by the end of this month and the reserved instance will be expired in mid January, I decided doing nothing by now. Once the reserved (idle) instace on east cost expired, I will shut it down.

I will keep pay-as-you-go as I got feeling that I may switch to other service providers later on, at least I should try out those Amazon competiters.

Home-grown solutions, yes or no?

 Triviality  No Responses »
Mar 192011
 

There are several teams that want to provide technical solution for my team in various area, and I’m thinking of adopting them or rejecting.

There is no sure rule for that, basically I need to make sure: first they perform good enough to support my products, second, they need to be quite reliable which means I will not worry about losing support, and third, they should focus on technical solution instead of trying to take product away from me.

So far the only decision had been made is that I’m going to use cloud storage team’s solution (network disk), I will put attachment for outgoing mails there to support unlimited attachment, later on will put attachments for incoming mails there. Search team also wants me leverage their platform, but I have to say their solution is not good enough for me and quite ad-hoc, so someone from my team will use Lucene to build our first solution, then we can compare to see if we are going to migrate or not.

I’m going to keep my team focus on mail/message area, thus meta data won’t be taken by anyone else. Also, anti-spam is key platform for my team so I won’t give up. For search and massive data storage in key-value pair format, I may give them out.

Tough decision though, always need to convince my team members agree that we should focus on key features instead of doing everything all by ourselves. We are still a big company and share a common platform will give the whole company a good shape of look.