When setting up EC2 with Amazon Web Services, is there any reason not to always use the cheapest instance (ie t2.nano - if you're going to be using tx.x based instances) and have it automatically scale up (note: UP, not OUT) to use what it requires?
Why start at a higher instance (eg. t2.micro, t2.small, t2.medium) if you don't necessarily need it?
Is the only reason not to, to ensure there's no performance issues while scaling auto-adjusts?
It seems automatically scaling UP is not available in AWS, and actually you have to scale OUT. With this in mind, it makes sense to always begin with the smallest instance that your app will run on well, which may not be the cheapest.
It's all based on your application usage. If your testing something in AWS with EC2 instance the T2 family instance is pretty fine and you can go ahead and use it. For Production, you can go with following instance base on your application.
Application usage:
CPU bouns use C4 Family
Memory bouns use R4 or m3 family
Storage bouns use d2,i2, and i3 family
Kindly find the following link for your reference.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-types.html
Quite a broad question in my opinion as we know nothing about the underlying application so I'll give an example based on some assumptions on when it obviously wouldn't work.
I'm also assuming you're using auto scaling here and adding another instance type based on alarms and metrics?
For example if you had a single instance inside an autoscaling group for an important customer focused solution then for the duration that your system is potentially not serving requests quick enough because of the resource limit and while the scaling process is taking place then you're potentially losing custom and/or money. Especially if you've got to scale about 5 times to get to the right instance type.
Also, what's the bottleneck? If its network io then scaling through the T2 family won't help at all as you'd benefit from enhanced networking which is only supported on certain instances types. For general purpose you'd be wanting an m4 type.
Related
I am new to AWS and recently set up a free t3.micro instance. My goal is to achieve a stable hosting of an Angular application with 2 spring boot services. I got everything working, but after a while, the spring boot services are not reachable anymore. When i redeploy the service it will run again. The spring boot services are packed as jar and after the deployment the process is started as a java process.
I thought AWS guarantees permanent availability out of the box. Do i need some more setup such as autoscaling to achieve the desired uptime of the services or is the t3.micro instance not suffienciently performant, so that i need to upgrade to a stronger instance to avoid the problem?
It depends :)
I think you did the right thing by starting with a small instance type and avoid over provisioning in the first place. T3 instance types are generally beneficial for 'burst' usage scenarios i.e. your application sporadically needs a compute spike but not a persistent one. T3 instance types usually work with credits based system, where you instance 'earns' credits when it is idle, and that buffer is always available in times of need (but only until consumed entirely). Then you need to wait for some time window again and earn the credits back.
For your current problem, I think first approach can be to get an idea of the current usage by going through the 'Monitoring' tab on the EC2 instance details page. This will help you understand if the needs are more compute related or i/o related and then you can choose an appropriate instance type from :
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types
Next step could also be to profile your application and understand the memory, compute utilisation better. AWS does guarantee availability/durability of resources, but how you consume those resources is more of an application thing, which AWS does not guarantee/control
For your ideas around, autoscaling and availability, it again depends on what your needs are in terms of cost, outages in AWS data centres etc. To have a reliable production setup, you could consider them, but not something really important in the first place.
I'm trying to determine if it makes sense to switch our hosting to EC2 from a dedicated dreamhost server, and if so, what EC2 instance type I should choose to get a good idea of the cost prior to switching. I would like to go low and then bump up if need be.
Current Usage:
dedicated server with 4 GB RAM and 4 CPUs
average disk usage: 783 MB
average bandwidth: 8.5 GB
This is really all the info I get from our dreamhost control panel, so hopefully it's enough to provide some recommendations on where to start.
Using the calculator located here, I'm leaning towards a t2.xlarge. Is that too much? not enough?
It is not possible for anyone to recommend the 'correct' instance type. This is because it depends on the operation of your particular application. It might be CPU-intensive, RAM-intensive, network-heavy, highly parallel, etc.
Some applications might need to handle occasional spikes of traffic, whereas other applications might be relatively consistent in their load.
The correct way to determine your 'best' instance type is to run tests that simulate the expected application load. If you can create an automated test, then you could run it against many different instance types and compare the performance vs cost.
Also, many applications are designed to be able to run across multiple instances, so it would be better to test various quantities of servers as well as their instance type.
You might also consider using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, which gives the ability to automatically add/remove servers based upon workload. This means that you could use much more powerful instances, but automatically turn some of them off during less-used periods. This affects the cost calculation because the more-powerful instances are more expensive, but you won't be using them all the time.
Then, you could also consider using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, which can be up to 90% less cost but might be terminated when the demand for such instances is higher. You can also combine On-Demand and Spot Instances to give additional capacity at a lower cost.
(Spot and Auto Scaling are only really applicable if you are using more than one instance to host your application.)
And finally, if your application only requires one instance, you could also consider using Amazon Lightsail that combines the price for instance type and network bandwidth to make the price more predictable.
Bottom line: It depends!
One final word: Most companies consider switching to AWS not purely on a cost basis ("if it makes sense to switch our hosting to EC2 from a dedicated dreamhost server"), but rather on the breadth of features that AWS offers that are not available in a traditional server hosting service. If all you need is "a server", it's probably easiest to consider Amazon LightSail or keep whatever is currently working for you. The cost saving with AWS won't be dramatic (or it might not even be cheaper!), but it will offer you a lot more capabilities if you ever grow beyond just requiring "a server".
I am currently using spot instances managed with auto-scaling groups. However, ASG has a number of shortcomings for use with spot instances. For example, it cannot launch instances of a different instance type if the current type is experiencing a price spike across all availability zones. It can't even re-distribute the number of running instances across zones (if one zone has a price spike, you're down 30% in the number of running instances.)
Are there any software solutions that I could run which would replace built-in AWS Auto-Scaling Groups? I've heard of SpotInst and Batchly, but I do not trust them. Basically, I think their business plan involves being bought out and killed by Amazon, like what happened to ClusterK. The evidence for this is the bizarre pricing policies and other red flags. I need something that I can self-host and depend on.
AWS recently released Auto Scaling for Spot Fleets which seems to fit your use case pretty well. You can define the cluster capacity in terms of vCPU that you need, choose the instance types you'd like to use and their weights and let AWS manage the rest.
They will provision spot instances at their current market price up to a limit you can define per instance type (as before), but integrating Auto Scaling capabilities.
You can find more information here.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-auto-scaling-for-ec2-spot-fleets/
It's unlikely that you're going to find something that takes into account everything you want. But because everything in Amazon is an API, so you can write that yourself. There are lots of ways to do that.
For example, you could write a small script (bash, ruby, python etc) that shells out the AWS CLI to get the price, then shells out to launch boxes. For bonus points, use the native AWS SDK library instead of shelling out. (That will be slightly easier to handle errors, etc.) For even more bonus points, open source it, and hope that other people to improve on it!
This script can run on your home computer, or on a t1.micro for $5/month. Or you could write it in node.js, and run it on Lambda for pennies per month.
Here at Spotinst, these are exactly the problems we built Elastigroup to solve.
Elastigroup enables running simultaneously on as many instance types and availability zones (within a region) as you’d like. This is coupled with several things to maintain production availability:
Our algorithm makes live choices for the best Spot markets in terms of price and availability.
When an interruption happens, we predict it about 15 minutes in advance and take all the necessary steps to ensure (and insure) the capacity of your group.
In the extreme case that none of the markets have Spot availability, we simply fall back to an on-demand instance.
We have a great relationship with AWS and work closely with both their technical and business teams to provide our joined customers with the best experience possible. As we manage resources inside your own AWS account, I wouldn’t put the relationship between us as a concern, to begin with.
I have had an EC2 instance working just fine for months (still developing, app not live yet), but I just realized I don't even know how to make my EC2 instance scale up / down depending on traffic.
The sheer number of services offered by Amazon is overwhelming, and I'm very confused.
Initially, I though I'd just have one instance, and Amazon would transparently allocate resources or create identical instances to handle traffic but it seems my impression was wrong.
My question is: can someone please tell me (in simple words, bullet list or point me to a tutorial) how to make my instance automatically grows to handle 100,000 simultaneous users then automatically goes back when the surge is done?
Assuming this is possible, can I do this via the AWS control panel? If so, how?
All I can see is micro, small, medium, etc.. instances. Each one has limited resources and it's not clear how to automatically setup the instance so that Amazon dynamically allocate additional resources to handle traffic spikes (or even gradually go up to keep with natural traffic growth for that matter).
Side question May I assume that Amazon auto-handle DDOS attacks when scaling up? (meaning rogue traffic would eventually stopped/slowed down by Amazon and scaling would only affect legitimate traffic spike). I realize this side question may be really stupid, keep in mind I didn't take my coffee yet :)
This article details how to auto scale using load balancers and EC2: http://kkpradeeban.blogspot.com/2011/01/auto-scaling-with-amazon-ec2.html
For scalability you may also want to look into this article on implementing a pub/sub system for distributed systems: http://www.infoq.com/articles/AmazonPubSub
You can't automatically change the instance type (m1.small, m1.large, etc.) in response to changing load. You can, however, have AWS automatically create new instances as your load increases, and tear them down when load subsides.
I believe this article will help you: http://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/.
I do have a free micro instance on AWS and quite often my CPU is throttled making it very hard to use.
I do want to know if there is any way to test a bigger instance so I see which one would be ok.
Side questions:
Can I go back to the free micro if I want?
Can I limit the cost of the testing, or do an estimate on it? I don't want to endup with a surprise bill as the result of the testing.
You can of course launch a new instance of a larger size, run your tests, then terminate the instance. It will not effect your running micro instance in any way at all.
AWS publishes their pricing data, so you can either calculate the cost manually or use the cost calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
There is no way to "cap" your AWS spend.
Mike Ryan's answer is correct as such, but there might be a better way to achieve your goal, because it is possible to upgrade your Amazon EC2 t1.micro instance in place. This process (and the few constraints) are summarized in Eric Hammond's article Moving an EC2 Instance to a Larger (or Smaller) Instance Type:
When you discover that the entry level t1.micro instance size is
simply not cutting it for your growing application needs, you may want
to try upgrading it to a larger instance type, perhaps an m1.small or
even a c1.medium.
Instead of starting a new instance and having to configure it from
scratch, you may be able to simply resize the existing instance by
asking Amazon move it to better hardware for you. Of course, since
this is AWS, you don’t have to actually talk to anybody—just type a
few commands and the job is done automatically.
Eric describes how to achieve this via the command line, but the same can be done via the AWS Management Console as well if your prefer, the instance menu features a respective command Change Instance Type (only enabled when the instance is stopped).
Alternatively you might also want to get acquainted with the ease of duplicating an EBS-Backed EC2 instance by means of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which allows you to start any number of exact duplicates of your current instance - this process is outlined in Creating Amazon EBS-Backed AMIs Using the Console for example.