Ushanka

Monday, April 14, 2008

Amazon EC2: Persistent Storage

Amazon has just started a private beta program for a new persistent storage API in EC2. According to their documentation, they provide an API to create and manage volumes between 1GB and 1TB in size that behave like unformatted disks. Each volume is persistent and independent of EC2 instances and a single EC2 instance can mount multiple volumes. Their disks are supposed to be low-latency and high throughput with calls to store snapshots onto S3.

A lack of persistent storage has been the biggest challenge for developers as EC2 (in my experience) has rather high failure rates. With this persistent storage API (scheduled for public release later this year), Amazon has just made EC2 a dead-easy buy-in.

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posted by sharvil at 9:06 AM

5 Comments:

  • Can you elaborate a bit on your experience of "high failure rate" in EC2.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At April 16, 2008 4:10 AM  

  • In the first 6 months, I've faced 3 system failures. In the first case, I was notified about degraded performance on my instance and I had enough time to shuffle things around. The other two times, I was notified that my instance is dead and its disk contents are no longer available.

    In all fairness, I haven't run across any major failures in the following 3-4 months. Given their track record, though, I'm expecting a total instance failure any time now.

    By Blogger sharvil, At April 16, 2008 3:21 PM  

  • Thanks for the details.
    So you keep your instance live all the time or keep launching & stopping instances from time to time.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At April 17, 2008 12:09 PM  

  • I keep my instance up all the time. In fact, I'm hosting this blog on it. ;-)

    By Blogger sharvil, At April 17, 2008 12:14 PM  

  • i found your projects on your site for subspace! I'll have too check all those out. btw, subspace is free now! and i play trenchwars. do you ever get on subspace anymore? whats your gammer tag? :)
    mine is Samuelextreme

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At August 11, 2008 6:03 PM  

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