Posts Tagged ‘amazon’
January 16th, 2010
January is going crazy for me down here in Moscow, lot’s of stuff happening, loads of work. No time to tweet, not time to blog. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I quit my job at GSL and now working at a new local startup. I’ll make sure to announce it as soon as the website is alright, so stay tuned ;) Anyways, as I wrote back in December, I’m moving all my stuff to the new EC2 in the Northern California region, and I guess I can say that I’m finally done.
Cloud Tips: Understanding Amazon Regions
The process is not too different from simply moving to a new dedicated hosting or to a new EC2 instance in the same region, though there are a few nuances. I was surprised to note that the S3 Fox plugin for Firefox haven’t yet added the new region (Europe is present though). I thought it might not work for some reason (S3 and EC2 being in different regions), but hopefully it does. I also considered using the good old mod_php for Apache instead of running mod_suphp which gave me a tiny boost in performance. All the configurations were straightforward, copy from one EC2, paste into the other. Not without a few changes of course.
I also had a change in the Elastic IP address, but hey that was whitelisted by Twitter! So I guess I’ll have to write to them again for the new whitelisting. Oh well.. One more interesting thing is that I’m now running on an EBS-backed instance, which was introduced by Amazon not so long ago. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting my stuff lost on a terminate or a rebooted machine as the whole drive is being dumped into an EBS. So backups are now completely instant via the AWS Management Console, they’re called Snapshots, takes one click and a few minutes ;) Now if I’d like to terminate one EC2 instance and start the whole thing over on another one, I’d just restore from EBS or Snapshot! Unless, of course, I decide to move to another region. I believe EBS blocks and Snapshots are restricted to regions, furthermore, EBS and EC2 compatibility are restricted to a certain zone in one region, which is obvious. I wouldn’t like to run an EC2 instanced in one data center, backed by a hard drive located in a different one.
Another good question would be Amazon CloudFront. Well, since the S3 buckets haven’t changed, CloudFront should work the way it used to despiting the move. Or at least I hope so ;)
December 24th, 2009
I wrote about Optimizing Your Amazon Web Services Costs back in November, where I mentioned some of the upsides of Reserved Instances at Amazon, but haven’t mentioned any downsides, and here we are. Two weeks later Amazon announced the Northern California Region opening. I thought it wouldn’t differ from the Virginia data center, but still decided to give it a shot for a few hours.
Happy Holidays from Amazon Web Services
I didn’t do much benchmarking but hey, I’m running a Twitter app.. Foller.me, remember? This means that access times to the Twitter API are crucial, so I started off with some basic pinging, and the pings from California seemed to be a few times faster than the ones from Virginia. Next, I ran Xdebug and analyzed the cache grind sheets for a few requests to different profile pages. Sweet to know that 95% of the time taken to load a page is curl accessing the Twitter API ;) this means that my code is well optimized. The overall results in the California region was ~40% better than Virginia, so I thought of moving there. The problem was that I already had a 1 year contract with Amazon for an instance in the Virginia region.
I wrote to Amazon via their contact form and asked about reservation transfers from one region to another, of course with additional charges (the California region is slightly more expensive) and soon got a negative reply. They mentioned that reserved instances are not transferrable from one region to another but I can always cancel my reservation in one region and open up a new one in the other. They didn’t mention any refunds so I decided to ask, but soon, scrolling through their FAQ I found this:
Q: Can I move a Reserved Instance from one Region or Availability Zone to another?
A: No. Each Reserved Instance is associated with a specific Region and Availability Zone, which is fixed for the lifetime of the Reserved Instance and cannot be changed.
Q: Can I cancel a Reserved Instance?
A: The one-time payment for a Reserved Instances is not refundable. However, you can choose not to run or entirely stop using your Reserved Instance at any time, at which point you will not incur any further usage charges.
So I asked myself, why the heck would anybody want to cancel a reserved instance if they don’t get refunded? The conversation kept going on Twitter. Friends mentioned that I could purchase an additional reserved instance in the California region and then sell computing time on the one I have in Virginia, but that sounded too sarcastic. I felt unlucky and sad, and thought I thought should stick to the instance I had in Virginia. If only I had waited a few more weeks before making the purchase…
This morning I received another email from Amazon, stating that although they don’t usually do this sort of stuff, they got approval to process the cancellation with a refund just this one time, so now I’m free to reserve an instance in Northern California, happy holidays! Well, on Christmas Eve, this feels like a gift and I’m very excited about launching all my stuff in the new region, hopefully in January. So, thank you Amazon and Happy Holidays to all of you.
December 16th, 2009
A few weeks ago I’ve setup my email in the /etc/aliases for user root (and the others) and started to actually read my root email from time to time (I wonder why I never did that before). Anyways, what bugged me straight away is that I had some rejected emails that were not being delivered, yielding the following errors (I removed some numbers):
Cloud Computing with Amazon Web Services
Deferred: 450 4.7.1 <domU.compute-1.internal>: Helo command rejected: Host not found
421 invalid sender domain 'domU.compute-1.internal' (misconfigured dns?)
And some others that looked alike. Tonnes of them, every four hours! The emails to other addresses were delivered fine though. I had WordPress notification messages delivered to my email, never lost a message. I also tried sending out a few using the mail command via SSH, everything okay. For a second I thought that maybe those addresses were simply invalid, but wouldn’t the server reply with an “Invalid recepient” error? Probably.. Here’s what I got from the Amazon Web Services support forums:
It seems that some remote mail servers complain about your server identifying itself in the SMTP dialogue as domU.compute-1.internal, while its external name is ec2.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Makes total sense. Perhaps some servers do try to see where the e-mail is coming from and of course the .internal domain is unresolvable (thus the “dns” misconfiguration error). I had to identify myself with an external, resolvable name. So I copied the external name into the /etc/mailname file and hmm.. Well, it’s been a week now and I haven’t received anymore delivery errors, so that must have worked.
December 7th, 2009
A few days ago Frederick Townes, author of the W3 Total Cache for WordPress has released an update to this wonderful plugin, and yes, it now fully supports Amazon S3 and CloudFront as the Content Delivery Network! This is a major one for me as I manually upload most of the static assets to my CloudFront account which may take quite a lot of time. The W3 Total Cache plugin does that for you in seconds! Post attachments, images, javascript, css.. All those could go to CloudFront in just 4 clicks. Frederick also mentioned that the upcoming update will also be surprising, which keeps me wondering.
WordPress: Now with Amazon S3 & CloudFront!
I also tried out the other options for page and database caching. A few tests showed up that memcache is faster than APC, so that’s where I stopped at database caching. Page caching was switched to enhanced, which I believe is a new option. The site performance graph at Google Webmaster Tools shows pretty good performance for Novermber and December (very close to 1.5 seconds) although the overall average is still up at 3.5 seconds, which in terms of Google is slower than 59% of sites. This is probably caused by the force majeures in September and October. Page load time peaked at over 7 seconds there.
One more funny fact about Google’s Site performance and Page Speed tools is the “Minimize DNS lookups” section, which most of the time shows up a single entry:
The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains: http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
Interesting. Perhaps I should copy that javascript file and serve it from my CDN, I wonder if that will work. Oh and then I’ll be missing all the nifty updates to Google Analytics, like the most recent one called Asynchronous Tracking – very neat by the way!
November 30th, 2009
I’ve been with Amazon for quite a long time now and you must have heard that their web hosting services aren’t very cheap. The average total of one instance per month (including EBS, S3 and all the others) was around $120 at the start. That was back in July 2009 when I had no idea about how all this stuff works. With a lot of experimenting I managed to drop my instance per month costs down by around 40%. Below are a few tips that can help you lower your Amazon Web Services charges:
Cloud Tips: Spare Those Extra Dollars
- Use reserved EC2 Instances where possible. Amazon charges $0.085 per hour for an m1.small Linux instance in the US, that’s around $61 per month and $734 per year. A reserved instance costs me $227 for one year, plus $0.03 per running hour, that makes it around $490 per year for an m1.small instance. Use reserved instances only if you’re sure that you’ll be using it for a whole year. You can save even more if you purchase a reserved instance for three years.
- Storage: EBS vs EC2. Pick EC2! That’s right, EC2! EBS charges you for provisioned storage, IO requests and snapshots. These may rise pretty quickly if you’re running MySQL on an EBS block – very risky! Run your MySQL on EC2. The php files and everything else should preferably be on EC2 aswell. You can use your EBS block for tiny backups of core PHP files if you’re running more than one EC2 instance.
- EBS is cheaper than S3. S3 should only be used in cases where you have to serve your static content from different servers (perhaps through CloudFront), and maybe store some backups there too (don’t forget to remove the old ones!), but EBS is cheaper, even with snapshots.
- CloudFront is okay. It does speed up your website, but you have to know that it’s more expensive for requests to Japan and Hong Kong
There you go. With these tips you should be able to get the Amazon hosting services for around $90/month, unless of course you have a 3 million visitors per day website ;) Also, for those of you wondering.. I haven’t used RackSpace, but I did compare their prices to Amazon’s and they’re more expensive.
