Amazon put the icing on the cake...

I received an email to from Amazon web service. This was the title:

"Amazon Elastic Block Store for Amazon EC2 is Now Available"

Yes finally after a long long wait amazon have finally released a persistence storage service for EC2. If you are not familiar with Amazon webservices check this out.

Amazon Web services

Basically amazon now provides a set of services to allow host all your new "next big thing" websites ideas on. And best of all they are pay as you go.

These are the main ones:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon SimpleDB
Amazon Simple Storage Service
Amazon Simple Queue Service

So the top of the list is EC2 the "Elastic Compute Cloud". Basically this service is a pay as you go virtual hosting service. You open an account, take an off the shelf linux image and press run.

Then you effectively have your hosting platform for your new website that you can connect to via ssh. You then configure it with your new application needs. (mysql, java, tomcat, apache, etc) then take a snapshot of the image. When you need to scale just turn on the new image instances. But only PAY AS YOU SCALE.

Anyway one of the reasons i was holding back on EC2 was that is kind of a an in memory instance. This means that if the instance goes down for any reason then you loose everything. This means if you have a mysql database running then you loose the data too. This is not a good thing right. Well until now the only options you had to get around this was some 3rd party companies that offer fail over and periodical back of the the database. Here are some listed below:

http://www.persistentfs.com/
http://www.elasticdrive.com/
http://www.rightscale.com

Of which http://www.rightscale.com seems to be the best. However this costs $2500 setup and $500 per month plus the cost of running multiple ec2 instances. Now this is a lot of money for a one man startup.

So along comes Elastic Block Store

This means you can setup your EC2 instances now with persistence storage. Ideal for a database. Whats more you only pay for what you need which is currently $0.10 per GB per month. Smiley faces all around...

Anyway i am going to get this setup and give it ago so it will be ready for my next web startup venture which is all most built. Stay tuned.