Amazon

Ynet on AWS. Let's hope we don't have to test their limits.

In Israel, more than in most places, no news is good news. Ynet, one of the largest news sites in Israel, recently posted a case study (at the bottom of this article) on handling large loads by moving their notification services to AWS.

"We used EC2, Elastic Load Balancers, and EBS... Us as an enterprise, we need something stable..."

They are contradicting themselves in my opinion. EBS and Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) are the two AWS services which fail the most and fail hardest with multiple downtimes spanning multiple days each.

EBS: Conceptually flawed, prone to cascading failures

Wrangling Elephants in the Cloud

You know the elephant in the room, the one no one wants to talk about. Well it turns out there was a whole herd of them hiding in my cloud. There's a herd of them hiding in your cloud too. I'm sure of it. Here is my story and how I learned to wrangle the elephants in the cloud.

Like many of you, my boss walked into my office about three years ago and said "We need to move everything to the cloud." At the time, I wasn't convinced that moving to the cloud had technical merit. The business, on the other hand, had decided that, for whatever reason, it was absolutely necessary.

As I began planning the move, selecting a cloud provider, picking tools with which to manage the deployment, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to provide the same quality of service in a cloud as I had in our server farm. There were too many unknowns.

How to Host a Screaming Fast Site for $0.03/Month

I had an idea. That's always how it starts. Before I know it, I've purchased the domain name and I'm futzing around with some HTML but where am I going to host it and how much is this going to end up costing me?

That's where I was when I came up with#DonateMyFee. "This is a site that is only going to cost me money", I thought to myself (the whole point is for people to donate money rather than paying me). I really didn't want to start shelling out big (or small) bucks on hosting.

Long story short, here is the recipe for a screaming fast website on a low budget: