Storage Space, The Final Frontier: Amazon EC2 adds persistent disks | Hacker News Reader

Storage Space, The Final Frontier: Amazon EC2 adds persistent disks

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82 pointsRyanGWU8216 comments

absolute first thought that popped in my head: holy shit.

second thought: the oreilly ec2 book i bought is now double outdated. first it was elastic IP/availability zones, now this.

edit: rightscale tested it out first-hand.. here are the thoughts from a developer's POV http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/04/13/amazon-takes-ec2-to-th...

Do you mean this one? "Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB"(http://tinyurl.com/57gfot) Would you still recommend the book?

oh yeah it's a great book, the parts I've skimmed over so far.

I skimmed it too and think PAWS is a tight dev guide for what author Murty calls AWS' "infrastructure services" (read: no Mturk, DevPay, Fulfillment, Associates or Alexa). The 600 pg book celebrates Ruby and the free download is particularly well commented in Python, Java.

My second thought was how great it is that Google joined the scalable web app business. Amazon's pre-announcement strikes me as a counterpunch to Google App Engine frenzy. Hope it comes soon and the cost isn't too much above S3.

I think this has the potential to be pretty huge. EC2 is becoming almost the ideal disaster recovery environment for us. All it would take is a simple bridge between our internal messaging platform and SQS and there we go.

This is an incredibly powerful paradigm even without persistent storage, and now with the addition of persistent storage, serving numerous small files just became much simpler than in the S3-only world.

I wonder how long it takes to back up a running virtual machine of, say, 2gb of ram and 10gb disk? At 1gb ethernet that would be over a minute best case, and the VM image would (presumbly?) have to stall while the copy takes place. So unfortunately running a single machine and doing hourly backups would probably be impossible, which is a shame - that would be amazing.

Great news, though!

this doesn't really have anything to do with backing up ram or necessarily the instance's main disks - it's a volume you can mount and format to your taste, and this volume is now available to multiple instances and can be snapshotted into S3 on-demand.

Ah, I see. Thanks for clearing that up.

The way the article describes it it's basically made available as a linux block storage device - you could set up software raid or access it as a raw device without a filesystem. Very nifty. I wonder how it plays with ZFS.

instance to s3/instance speed is 250MB/sec so just under a minute for your 12 gig scenario iirc.. but yeah this is a mountable volume as others have mentioned

Holy crap, now I have no reason not to use EC2.

This looks pretty cool. It's a shame we'll never be able to use it due concerns over HIPAA privacy regulations.

Amazon is enabling startups to be Google killers.

This makes me think: Now I really want to use this! Can anyone recommend a way to learn using AWS? Is there a useful book? Do I have to learn Ruby first?

Maybe visit their site? There's a book mentioned above also. Its platform independent (kind of) so you can use PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby........

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