Did you know that every aspect of this blog is powered by Amazon Web Services? That’s right, everything down to DNS is in the cloud! It’s kind of a stupid thing to blog about, but I think the next generation of web hosting will be entirely “cloud based”. It makes sense too. Clouds are elastic. Just like the kind found in pants. Clouds can shrink and expand as necessary. The only difference is that, theoretically, Clouds won’t reach a breaking point and make you buy new pants.
See exactly how this blog works after the break.
Here’s the breakdown of this blog’s piping:
Server – Cloud instance running on EC2
Storage – Amazon S3/CloudFront
DNS – Amazon Route 53
On EC2: EC2 is one of the most powerful cloud computing platforms available. It’s fast, it’s cheap, and incredibly easy to use.
On Storage: S3 is awesome and so is CloudFront. I use both depending on what I’m serving. Videos and stuff will always use CloudFront while static content (CSS, JS, Images, etc.) will always use S3.
On DNS: Saying DNS is “in the cloud” is kind of silly. It’s always been “in the cloud”. It’s just a new phrase to explain it. While Route 53 isn’t the easiest DNS/NS solution available, it’s definitely fast. It’s also distributed across 4 name server clusters in various parts of the world.
When I made the DNS move earlier in the week, it hit me: the only thing that you can’t do with AWS is register domain names…but I have a feeling that one day that will be made available. Just a matter of time. And when it is made available, I’ll use it as well.
I’ll write a tutorial on setting every aspect of a cloud based blog in a few days so you too can see how easy* this is.
*Easy meaning you have a working understanding of Linux, SSH, and then some.
AWS is an awesome service, but for most it is far more than they need to pay. Even a small instance of EC2 and minimal storage, etc comes out to about $70/month. This is a hard pill to swallow for sites with only a 1000 or so visits per day that can get by on shared hosting and good optimization.
You’re absolutely right! It’s more than I need and more than most will ever need. I just love the control aspect of it. I love being able to throw up an instance whenever I want and having root access to it…
I won’t lie though, I’m only paying about $5 a month for all of this. Check out http://aws.amazon.com/free
Ah ha, I’ve looked at the free service, but in comparison to what it will cost at the end of the year I’m not sure the advantage over other VPS hosts is there. How have you found the performance to be? Any issues?
I think for most, the soft cost of having to maintain everything yourself makes a VPS with someone like MediaTemple a better option…but if you don’t mind that…it’s a different story.
The performance on the micro instance is pretty good. The only downside is the lack of RAM. A lot of caching programs (especially Varnish) I wanted to use I couldn’t just because of that.
Prior to the current configuration I was running NGINX and PHP5-FPM. That version of PHP spawns child processes as needed. They consume RAM like none other, so I had to trim the max allowed drastically and lost some performance before finally changing over to lighttpd and PHP-CGI…
In all, it’s a good platform, but it’s a serious time investment to configure everything the right way.