MongoDB on AWS: a whitepaper from Amazon | Hacker News Reader

MongoDB on AWS: a whitepaper from Amazon

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79 pointsgeorgecalm9 comments

I built my startup using this exact outlay, so it's wonderful to have this guide in hand for when we need to scale Mongo across multiple EC2 instances. This presentation from Jared Rosoff of 10gen was extremely helpful on the first go, and it's satisfying to see that the AWS paper corroborates the content.

http://www.10gen.com/presentations/mongosf-2011/running-mong...

Couldn't be happier with the performance so far.

How is the pricing for Mongo on EC2?

The absolute minimum would be single server w/ journaling running on a 64-bit instance. I am assuming the 64-bit micro is to IO bound, so the Large instance is the next minimum viable instance. At $0.34/hr, just in instance fees it's ~ $245 a month. Am I correct in assuming this is the entry level Mongo setup on EC2?

Kinda sorta, yes. You can commit to using that instance for 1 or 3 years and prepay for a discount... $164 per month if you reserve for a year, $126 per month if you reserve for 3 years. Really you also need to factor in the data transfer fees, and the storage and IO fees of a RAID array of EBS disks.

Last time I used EC2 to run a large database, the IO fees for EBS were almost as much as the EC2 fees... so take your estimate for the instance and double it. The real cost of running an active Mongo instance on one EC2 instance with a 2-disk EBS RAID might be closer to $400 per month than $245.

EC2 is not price-competitive if you don't need to be able to launch and terminate instances on the fly on a regular basis. For small deployments, get a VPS, for larger ones, dedicated servers. I used to run most of my sites on Amazon services. I later moved (back) to renting servers from Softlayer. I was maxing out most of my servers at both providers -- I don't have extra money to blow on capacity before I need it. For every ~$350 EC2+EBS+Transfer instance at Amazon, I only need a ~$160 physical server now.

I think you need to add an EBS volume (see page 13, Storage Minimum) for permanent storage.

What's with the [scribd]? Shouldn't it be [pdf]? I know what scribd is, but why use it as a tag linking to a pdf? It's misleading as scribd used a flash applet, right?

All PDFs, Docs, PPTs etc submitted on HN have the [scribd] link by default[1]. It's a way for people to view the document on their browser without having to download it first (there are still browsers out there like Firefox on OS X that do not have an in built PDF viewer)

[1] - http://www.scribd.com/doc/50406482/Hacker-News-Integrates-Wi...

Scribd also requires logging in before being able to download, so it's accurate enough.

The [scribd] text is a second link. If you click it your browser will load the pdf via scribd instead of downloading it.

I was confused at first as well, because I thought the title was a single link and the text in brackets was descriptive.

I wish they'd just wrapped it up as elastic mongo like they did with mysql, oracle and memcache.

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