I am working on something similar to AdMob and was planning to use Amazon Web Services this time. I would like to use EC2 instance running Linux on it.
What do you think a AdMob like site has utilization for a month and what's the best configured instance for it be?
It would use HTTPS for which I have already bought SSL certificate. I am more concerned about utilization and data transfer in and out. Is there a way to calculate usage per user?
Your question is really open, but I have a solution :
Look at the AWS Architecture Center :
http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/
There are plenty of typical architecture.
You have an adserving architecture here :
http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_ac_ra_adserving_06.pdf
Hope this will help you.
[To calculate usage per user, it's not easy. You can save all your user's actions, and public actions, but it will cost you usage costs. The best way is to evaluate it for the next months, with last months datas.]
Related
The company which I work right now planning to use AWS to host a new website for a client. Their old website had roughly 75,000 sessions and 250,000 page views per year. We haven't used AWS before and I need to give a rough cost estimate to my project manager.
This new website is going to be mostly content-driven with a cms backend (probably WordPress) + a cost calculator for their services. Can anyone give me a rough idea about the cost to host such kind of a website in aws?
I have used simple monthly calculator with a single Linux t2.small 3 Year upfront which gave me around 470$.
(forgive my English)
The only way to know the cost is to know the actual services you will consume (Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, database, etc). It is not possible to give an accurate "guess" of these requirements because it really does depend upon the application and usage patterns.
It is normally recommended that you implement the system and run it for a while before committing to Reserved Instances so that you have a chance to measure performance and test a few different instance types.
Be careful using T2 instances for production workloads. They are very powerful instances, but if the CPU Credits run out, the amount of CPU is limited.
Bottom line: Implement, measure, test. Then you'll know what is right for your needs.
Take Note
When you are new in AWS you have a 1 year free tier on a single t2.micro
Just pulled it out, looking into your requirement you may not need this
One load balancer and App server should be fine (Just use route53 to serve some static pages from s3 while upgrading or scalling )
Use of email subscription and processing of Some document can be handled with AWS Lambda, SNS and SWQ which may further reduce the cost ( you may reduce the server size and do all the hevay lifting from Lambda)
A simple webpage with 3000 request/monthly can be handled by T2 micro which is almost free for one year as mentioned above in the note
You don't have a lot of details in your question. AWS has a wide variety of services that you could be using in that scenario. To accurately estimate costs, you should gather these details:
What will the AWS storage be used for? A database, applications, file storage?
How big will the objects be? Each type of storage has different limits on individual file size, estimate your largest object size.
How long will you store these objects? This will help you determine static, persistent or container storage.
What is the total size of the storage you need? Again, different products have different limits.
How often do you need to do backup snapshots? Where will you store them?
Every cloud vendor has a detailed calculator to help you determine costs. However, to use them effectively you need to have all of these questions answered and you need to understand what each product is used for. If you would like to get a quick estimate of costs, you can use this calculator by NetApp.
I operate a number of content websites that have several million user sessions and need a reliable way to monitor some real-time metrics on particular pieces of content (key metrics being: pageviews/unique pageviews over time, unique users, referrers).
The use case here is for the stats to be visible to authors/staff on the site, as well as to act as source data for real-time content popularity algorithms.
We already use Google Analytics, but this does not update quickly enough (4-24 hours depending on traffic volume). Google Analytics does offer a real-time reporting API, but this is currently in closed beta (I have requested access several times, but no joy yet).
New Relic appears to offer a few analytics products, but they are quite expensive ($149/500k pageviews - we have several times this).
Other answers I found on StackOverflow suggest building your own, but this was 3-5 years ago. Any ideas?
Heard some good things about Woopra and they offer 1.2m page views for the same price as Relic.
https://www.woopra.com/pricing/
If that's too expensive then it's live loading your logs and using an elastic search service to read them to get he data you want but you will need access to your logs whilst they are being written to.
A service like Loggly might suit you which would enable you to "live tail" your logs (view whilst being written) but again there is a cost to that.
Failing that you could do something yourself or get someone on freelancer to knock something up for you enabling logs to be read and displayed in a format you recognise.
https://www.portent.com/blog/analytics/how-to-read-a-web-site-log-file.htm
If the metrics that you need to track are just limited to the ones that you have listed (Page Views, Unique Users, Referrers) you may think of collecting the logs of your web servers and using a log analyzer.
There are several free tools available on the Internet to get real-time statistics out of those logs.
Take a look at www.elastic.co, for example.
Hope this helps!
Google Analytics offers real time data viewing now, if that's what you want?
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1638635?hl=en
I believe their API is now released as we are now looking at incorporating this!
If you have access to web server logs then you can actually set up Elastic Search as a search engine and along with log parser as Logstash and Kibana as Front end tool for analyzing the data.
For more information: please go through the elastic search link.
Elasticsearch weblink
I have a web app running on php, mysql, apache on a virtual windows server. I want to redesign it so it is scalable (for fun so I can learn new things) on AWS.
I can see how to setup an EC2 and dump it all in there but I want to make it scalable and take advantage of all the cool features on AWS.
I've tried googling but just can't find a simple guide (note - I have no command line experience of Linux)
Can anyone direct me to detailed resources that can lead me through the steps and teach me? Or alternatively, summarise the steps in an answer so I can research based on what you say.
Thanks
AWS is growing and changing all the time, so there aren't a lot of books to help. Amazon offers training that's excellent. I took their three day class on Architecting with AWS that seems to be just what you're looking for.
Of course, not everyone can afford to spend the travel time and money to attend a class. The AWS re:Invent conference in November 2012 had a lot of sessions related to what you want, and most (maybe all) of the sessions have videos available online for free. Building Web Scale Applications With AWS is probably relevant (slides and video available), as is Dissecting an Internet-Scale Application (slides and video available).
A great way to understand these options better is by fiddling with your existing application on AWS. It will be easy to just move it to an EC2 instance in AWS, then start taking more advantage of what's available. The first thing I'd do is get rid of the MySql server on your own machine and use one offered with RDS. Once that's stable, create one or more read replicas in RDS, and change your application to read from them for most operations, reading from the main (writable) database only when you need completely current results.
Does your application keep any data on the web server, other than in the database? If so, get rid of all local storage by moving that data off the EC2 instance. Some of it might go to the database, some (like big files) might be suitable for S3. DynamoDB is a good place for things like session data.
All of the above reduces the load on the web server to just your application code, which helps with scalability. And now that you keep no state on the web server, you can use ELB and Auto-scaling to automatically run multiple web servers (and even automatically launch more as needed) to handle greater load.
Does the application have any long running, intensive operations that you now perform on demand from a web request? Consider not performing the operation when asked, but instead queueing the request using SQS, and just telling the user you'll get to it. Now have long running processes (or cron jobs or scheduled tasks) check the queue regularly, run the requested operation, and email the result (using SES) back to the user. To really scale up, you can move those jobs off your web server to dedicated machines, and again use auto-scaling if needed.
Do you need bigger machines, or perhaps can live with smaller ones? CloudWatch metrics can show you how much IO, memory, and CPU are used over time. You can use provisioned IOPS with EC2 or RDS instances to improve performance (at a cost) as needed, and use difference size instances for more memory or CPU.
All this AWS setup and configuration can be done with the AWS web console, or command-line tools, or SDKs available in many languages (Python's boto library is great). After learning the basics, look into CloudFormation to automate it better (I've written a couple of posts about that so far).
That's a bit of the 10,000 foot high view of one approach. You'll need to discover the details of each AWS service when you try to use them. AWS has good documentation about all of them.
Depending on how you look at it, this is more of a comment than it is an answer, but it was too long to write as a comment.
What you're asking for really can't be answered on SO--it's a huge, complex question. You're basically asking is "How to I design a highly-scalable, durable application that can be deployed on a cloud-based platform?" The answer depends largely on:
The specifics of your application--what does it do and how does it work?
Your tolerance for downtime balanced against your budget
Your present development and deployment workflow
The resources/skill sets you have on-staff to support the application
What your launch time frame looks like.
I run a software consulting company that specializes in consulting on Amazon Web Services architecture. About 80% of our business is investigating and answering these questions for our clients. It's a multi-week long project each time.
However, to get you pointed in the right direction, I'd recommend that you look at Elastic Beanstalk. It's a PaaS-like service that abstracts away the underlying AWS resources, making AWS easier to use for developers who don't have a lot of sysadmin experience. Think of it as "training wheels" for designing an autoscaling application on AWS.
I wondered if anyone can point me in the right direction in regards to installing Railo on AWS.
In my spare time I've put together a website to sell illustrations, but due to cost I'm unable to keep on spending money hosting it on a dedicate CF server with almost zero budget for marketing. I've been toying with the idea of setting up an account with Amazon and installing Railo.
Over the past few months I've had different advice, such as get a S3 account to host the images and an EC2 account for Railo for the website and DB with SSL, or just have S3 account where I will be able to host Railo and have my images on the same server. I'm not sure what is best and I was wondering if you can advise what you think a good solution would be.
I've read a few blogs some with good details on setups but they seem to be over a year+ old, so I'm not sure if they are valid solution any more. It's very much over my head, as I'm a developer, but I'm very eager to learn new things especially about the cloud service as it's not a common area to get involved in when working for companies. In the past I used to tag a long to server rooms and understand the infrastructure but now everything is done remotely and it's not so easy to get involved.
Any basic advice/advanced advice from your experiences of what I should follow and if you know of any good resources would be very much appreciated.
Should I get an S3 and EC2 AWS setup or will one of them do (will need DB connectivity)?
Load balancing two EC2 instances will that be hard to configure, I will need to web servers.
I just posted this very topic a few weeks ago. Should still be more than up to date:
http://blog.nictunney.com/2012/03/railo-tomcat-and-apache-on-amazon-ec2.html
HTH
Is there an easy way to migrate a hosted LAMP site to Amazon Web Services? I have hobby sites and sites for family members where we're spending far too much per month compared to what we would be paying on AWS.
Typical el cheapo example of what I'd like to move over to AWS:
GoDaddy domain
site hosted at 1&1 or MochaHost
a handful of PHP files within a certain directory structure
a small MySQL database
.htaccess file for URL rewriting and the like
The tutorials I've found online necessitate PuTTY, Linux commands, etc. While these aren't the most cumbersome hurdles imaginable, it seems overly complicated. What's the easiest way to do this?
The ideal solution would be something like what you do to set up a web host: point GoDaddy to it, upload files, import database, done. (Bonus points for phpMyAdmin being already installed but certainly not necessary.)
It would seem the amazon AWS marketplace has now got a solution for your problem :
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B0078UIFF2/ref=gtw_msl_title/182-2227858-3810327?ie=UTF8&pf_rd_r=1RMV12H8SJEKSDPC569Y&pf_rd_m=A33KC2ESLMUT5Y&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=awsmp-gateway-1&pf_rd_p=1362852262&pf_rd_s=right-3
Or from their own site
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/lampstack
A full LAMP stack including PHPMyAdmin with no setup required.
As for your site and database migration itself (which should require no more than file copies and a database backup/restore) the only way to make this less cumbersome is to have someone else do it for you...
Dinah,
As a Web Development company I've experienced an unreal number of hosting companies. I've also been very closely involved with investigating cloud hosting solutions for sites in the LAMP and Windows stacks.
You've quoted GoDaddy, 1And1 and Mochahost for micro-sized Linux sites so I'm guessing you're using a benchmark of $2 - $4 per month, per site. It sounds like you have a "few" sites (5ish?) and need at least one database.
I've yet to see any tool that will move more than the most basic (i.e. file only, no db) websites into Cloud hosting. As most people are suggesting, there isn't much you can do to avoid the initial environment setup. (You should factor your time in too. If you spend 10 hours doing this, you could bill clients 10 x $hourly-rate and have just bought the hosting for your friends and family.)
When you look at AWS (or anyone) remember these things:
Compute cycles is only where it starts. When you buy hosting from traditional ISPs they are selling you cycles, disk space AND database hosting. Their default levels for allowed cycles, database size and traffic is also typically much higher before you are stopped or charged for "overage", or over-usage.
Factor in the cost of your 1 database, and consider how likely it will be that you need more. The database hosting charges can increase Cloud costs very quickly.
While you are likely going to need few CCs (compute cycles) for your basic sites, the free tier hosting maximums are still pretty low. Anticipate breaking past the free hosting and being charged monthly.
Disk space it also billed. Factor in your costs of CCs, DB and HDD by using their pricing estimator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
If your friends and family want to have access to the system they won't get it unless you use a hosting company that allows "white labeling" and provides a way to split your main account into smaller mini-hosting accounts. They can even be setup to give self-admin and direct billing options if you went with a host like www.rackspace.com. The problem is you don't sound like you want to bill anyone and their minimum account is likely way too big for your needs.
Remember that GoDaddy (and others) frequently give away a year of hosting with even simple domain registrations. Before I got my own servers I used to take HUGE advantage of these. I've probably been given like 40+ free hosting accounts, etc. in my lifetime as a client. (I still register a ton of domain through them. I also resell their hosting.)
If you aren't already, consider the use of CMS systems that support portaling (one instance, many websites under different domains). While I personally prefer DotNetNuke I'm sure that one of its LAMP stack competitors can do the same for you. This will keep you using only one database and simplify your needs further.
I hope this helps you make a well educated choice. I think it'll be a fine-line between benefits and costs. Only knowing the exact size of every site, every database and the typical traffic would allow this to be determined in advance. Database count and traffic will be your main "enemies". Optimize files to reduce disk-space needs AND your traffic levels in terms of data transferred.
Best of luck.
Actually it depends upon your server architecture, whether you want to migrate whole of your LAMP stack to Amazon EC2.
Or use different Amazon web services for different server components like Amazon S3 for storage and Amazon RDS for mysql database and so.
In case if you are going with LAMP on EC2: This tutorial will atleast give you a head up.
Anyways you still have to go with essential steps of setting up the AMI and installing LAMP through SSH.