Anybody using Amazon Web Services (S3, EC2) in their startup?

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Use-AWS%3F-home-page/b/ref=sc_fe_l_1/103-1678423-5846208?ie=UTF8&node=15763371&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA

by mattculbreth • 19 years ago

14 20 19 years ago

amazon.com

mattculbreth3• 19 years ago

This seems like the coolest thing since sliced bread. We're experimenting with S3 but I'm really interested in EC2 also. Anybody else using AWS?

zach2• 19 years ago

Sure, if you're using Rails it's really easy to use attachment_fu (the new generation of the image/file storing acts_as_attachment plugin) to keep uploaded photos on S3. Also for Rails, Jamglue's technique of putting your entire static file hierarchy on S3 is great for maximimizing your app servers' bandwidth. BTW, Justin.tv runs off EC2 servers.

pg• 19 years ago

Practically all the current batch of YC startups are using S3.

binarybana• 19 years ago

I know that YouOS uses it.

nickb2• 19 years ago

I love S3! It's so easy to get started. I have less use for EC2 since I have less computations to do. I wish I could run a database on EC2...

zach2• 19 years ago

I assume they're working on a database solution to go along with S3 and EC2. Of course I have no proof they are, though.

mattculbreth3• 19 years ago

Arg, I didn't notice that you can't run a database. I'm not in that program yet.

Maybe I'll just keep everything on S3 as key/value pairs and then use the Queue service to make it all happen. It'd be fun anyway.

inklesspen2• 19 years ago

You can't run a database?

What's the point of this, then: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry!default.jspa?categoryID=101&externalID=519&fromSearchPage=true

nickb2• 19 years ago

This past week I listened in on Werner Vogels' ETech 2007 speech and he said, explicitly, that EC2 is not suitable for high performance, large scale, databases. My database is more than 10Gb in size. You can't have that large image on EC2. I guess you could get away by hosting some tables there that:

a) don't take up much space,

b) don't change much and

c) don't have to have the latest data.

brett• 19 years ago

I've used S3 on a few projects and would definitely endorse it. I just got accepted to the EC2 beta last week and haven't started messing around with it.

mattculbreth3• 19 years ago

This is just another cool thing happening to reduce the cost of new software apps. Salesforce.com has the same thing with Apex. The only bad thing there is that they tie you a bit too much to their technologies (Java/Oracle). They have adapters for other platforms but it still runs on Java/Oracle.

comforteagle• 19 years ago

Sure are. We're melding ec2 instances to s3 as an actual filesystem.

-Steve fooworks.com

onetimeliner• 19 years ago

Using it on http://onetimeline.com - EC2 for indexing nodes and web front end, s3 for data storage and awsp for webcrawler. Couldn't have got up this fast without it - 1.5 years in the making (well fast to develop a search engine anyways!)

mattjaynes• 19 years ago

AWS is truly amazing.

I'm currently developing an open-source framework that allows theoretically infinite scalability utilizing round-robin dns, S3, EC2, S3DFS (allows mounting an S3 bucket as a local file system on multiple EC2 instances), SQLite (serverless embeddable database where each db is just a flat file).

S3DFS works at the block level and has read/write caching so is really fast. However, it requires a commercial license for non-personal use.

SQLite is amazing in it's power and simplicity. It will start to have issues on a high-traffic website, but I'm breaking each user into their own db file. That sounds really bad - but SQLite has a great feature that allows you to attach multiple databases together and run queries across them as if it's just one database (handy for site-wide stats, search indexing, etc). Also, since the db's are just flat-files - backing up is super-easy with tar gzip!

I'm using PHP for the coding, but anticipate other languages libraries to be built to use the system as well.

Help is welcome, just let me know if you're interested!

I was thinking of calling it infinizon - but that sounds kinda dorky - thoughts?

http://www.sqlite.org/

http://www.openfount.com/blog/s3dfs-for-ec2

Update: I just came across http://rightscale.com which is an amazing AWS console that allows you to control almost all aspects of EC2, S3, and SQS. Too many features to list here, but definitely a must see. I've been playing around with it and it works great.

jganetsk• 19 years ago

Just so everyone is aware, S3 guarantees only 4 nines of relability (99.99% uptime), not 5 nines.

5 nines means the service is down, on average, 5 minutes out of a year.

4 nines would be almost an hour.

That's still pretty damn good.

Anybody using Amazon Web Services (S3, EC2) in their startup?

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