Feb 062013
 

I’m trying my best to use as less EC2 hosts as possible, and seems I successfully made all of my stuffs running on … one micro instance ๐Ÿ˜€ .

Actually it surprised me a little thinking that I was running 2 large, 1 small, and 3 micro back to last September, obviously I spent too much on “playing” ๐Ÿ™ .

Now I’m waiting all crawlers heading to the new machine, I found some crawlers are really … stupid? They didn’t move to the new machine even after the DNS had been update for more than 12 hours.

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.

May 212012
 

I was running crawler-like application on my EC2 nodes, which grab a set of web pages, save them locally, then do some follow-ups, obviously I hit the bottleneck of the EC2 nodes.

It seems EC2’s storage, at least EBS performs quite bad, I don’t have comparison in number, but for the follow-ups jobs, which are nothing to do with network, EC2 is hundreds or thousands times slower than a regular modern machine.

I guess traditional applications on EC2 don’t rely on EBS too much – most data write to S3/RDS/SDB, etc. However, I do have to pay more attention on this as there is a friend gets to run some critical jobs and I recommended EC2 … I will do some more tests and post result here if I find anything signaficant.

Feb 142012
 

The AWS App on iOS is pretty much done, at least I have made readonly part of S3 and EC2 works, and I don’t think write operations (create, update, delete, etc) are feasible to mobile phones.

I’m moving to Windows Phone now, trying to build up similar App in term of functionality – I’m not sure if I can build things with similar UI since different app store may have totally different tastes/rules on UI standard, better follow what they asked for.

I wish Windows Phone development will be easier thinking of I’ve done .Net/Visual Studio development before, let’s see – I give myself 2 weeks, and will spend no more than an hour per day.

Actually I tried both Android and Windows Phone the other day, trying to get basic idea of development. Obviously I don’t like Android, either because of I’m not a Java fan, or because of ugly interface of Eclipse – it may only be that ugly on OSX though, but I don’t have space (read: memory) to launch such a fat IDE in my Windows VM so leave it to the last.

Jan 132012
 

I’ve moved to Amazon EC2 as mentioned here and mentioned the monthly pay is $17, that was based on EC2 node’s cost is $14 I think, and after dig into EC2’s offers, I found something more useful, see below:

Amazon has this Reserved Instance which is pretty good to Web servers that needs to be running for all the time, I did some calculation and here is the comparison for 1-year term:

Plan One time Hourly Yearly Monthly (alloc.)
On demand 0 0.020 175.20 14.60
light 23 0.012 128.12 10.68
medium 54 0.007 115.32 9.61
heavy 62 0.005 105.80 8.82

Although 3-years term may save more, I don’t want to sign such a long contract as $8.82 per month is good enough to me now.

I will move to the heavy one after my free tier expires.

Jan 042012
 

I’ve moved all my blog sites (why do I have so many? :-W ) to an Amazon EC2 micro instance running Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit version, everything seems good so far and I will let it running there for a week or two before doing the switch. The most important factor that will or will not make the transition is cost – based on my rough calculation the cost for EC2 will be something around $17 (forget the free tier, I have to pay for it after one year anyway), and Linode is $19.99.

If these blog sites work fine, I will try to put some other stuffs over EC2, and at the same time, try out EC2 work with S3 and SDB.

Dec 312011
 

I’m in the middle of moving some stuffs to Amazon AWS, and the first project is moving back up of my friend’s web site to Amazon as it gets no online access and data volume is not that big. The test seems good so far with my (first year) free AWS S3, I will stop current backup plan which sending data to my personal server in a week or two.

Amazon did great job to ease usage of AWS at least for S3, and based on my limited experience on EC2 it is not that hard to deploy but I still need to figure out how difficult it is to deploy multiple instances in a programable way as this will be the most reasonable way to get things done.

I’m currently on AWS Free Usage Tier, good way to evaluate how much I’m going to spend in a serious project.