Software Physics

Just some updates from a few more hours of experimentations…

1) Lots of stuff coming out on the EC2 forum in particular, confirmation that the virtualization layer is xen.

2) When you save “bundle” an instance you only get the root file system. EC2 provides 160MB of virtual disk to your image. This is ephemeral so any data created here (like, say, your database files) will not get saved. You would need to bundle and save separately or arrange your own storage somehow (presumably to S3).

I do other things than watch Amazon, really. This is really cool stuff. I’m using the beta of Amazon’s utility computing service. The upshot is that it’s similar in philosophy to S3 - simple and just works. Compute time for a dedicated Fedora image is $.10/hr with $.20/GB of data transfer. Amazon provides stock images which you can load whatever you want in. When you’re done, you bundle and store the image in S3. Once stored in S3, you register the location of the image with the EC2 service then can fire it up directly. Read more »

I’ve had an interesting realization recently. I always viewed the utility storage model from the perspective that data would “live” on my machines and that I would “back up” in the cloud. However, as I’ve started using S3 mounted as a drive on my home machines (Jungle Disk + NetDrive), I’ve realized that it won’t work this way at all. Working with these programs and futzing with their respective caches, I’ve realized that virtually all of my data will eventually live in the cloud and only a limited working set cached locally.

Maybe not earth-shattering for you but certainly a change of perspective for me…