Account Setup
For some reason Amazon thought they'd leverage their consumer shopping product UI for AWS. C'mon. I don't want to feel like I'm shopping for bathroom soap while setting up 509 certificates for API use. After getting over the UI, account setup was pretty straightforward. A Public Key handshake here, and Private Key store there, with a dash of PKI setup, and we had a full fledged AWS account ready for accessing EC2 and S3.Clustering and what-not
AWS is dirt simple if you don't have a complex clustered network topology with lots of services running across multiple machines. If you're hosting a simple shopping website for example, you should be using AWS; no question. Amazon's ability to understand the relative importance of machines in your cluster doesn't exist; all instances (logical machines) are treated equal. That's great for AWS, but not necessarily for you. EC2 doesn't support multi-cast between machines, so if your model needs self-discovery, you'll need to come up with a homegrown solution, or find one cobbled together on the net.Queues
If you're using a queueing framework, you may want to consider replacing it with Amazon's version (Simple Queue Service). Doing so alleviates some of the clustering/multi-cast issues I mentioned. If you need machine-to-machine level performance, there are potentially significant downsides however (note: we haven't finished load testing here, so the performance issues I outline are educated guesses; not based on empirical data):- There's an HTTP version. While this is nice and standard, message overhead is likely much larger than its brethren.
- There's a SOAP version. While this is nice and standard...
- Message movement in and out of AWS will cost you financially ($1 per 1M messages), though intra-EC2 communication is free.
- Message movement in and out of AWS will cost you in latency (2-10 seconds to get a msg on the queue; YIKES!)
Persistent Storage
While S3 obviously provides persistent storage, the coupling with EC2 appears crude enough that instance-level storage requires some hacking. Amazon is wait-list-beta testing a more streamlined persistent storage model for EC2, and we're not in the beta yet, so I can't comment.Ecosystem
There are already companies that provide nice automated instance provisioning services with the click of a UI element. If you don't use these (they can be pricey), you'll be building your own or writing scripts to setup/tear-down machines on-demand.If I've missed something, or someone has better data, I'd love to hear about it. I have high hopes for cloud computing, and our initial experience is pretty good. I should disclose that we're building infrastructure software that has significant performance needs around message transmission, and a highly dynamic data set. We're not building websites.
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