I don't have any use for EC2 yet but like any good hacker I just want to tinker.
I sit on the ec2ubuntu google group http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu
its a great group, and Eric Hammond created one of the best images i have seen yet. the original image was only ~100MB in size. Eric has done a lot of work to keep the images fast and small. He has put a number of optimizations in that few of the other public images have.
As far as loadBalancing goes, we are going with Round Robin DNS until we HAVE to move to something more compliecated.
Nettica offers some great tools for setting up Dynamic Round Robbin DNS records.
RightScale is not so much a load balancing company as it provides you with some webui stuff to manage servers. EC2 in firefox is a much better start.
WinSCP is a god send. It makes it so easy to put files on your instance. I am still trying to figure out how to either Wine install WinSCP on my Ubuntu install or to find a replacement.
if you need anything and are an ubuntu user, join the group and email me.
bandwidth between EC2 and S3 = 250Mb/s which is faster than most disks I know of. Latency is about 20ms. Accessing 2 xml files during a read/write still seems fast for the web.
As far as I know you launch the instance, ssh on it and have fun. That url is your instance address. You can make a loadb alancer by installing Apache or Nginx on a server (instance or other) then from there proxy to your instances (you'll have to open the ports). See the Nginx wiki for more documentation (http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxLoadBalanceExample). If you need help configuring the Nginx shout.
It's basically VPS but where you pay by the hour and it doesn't have a static IP and persistent hdd. You can also use a AMI with what do you need (I saw there was one for Rails).
Yeah I'm looking to setup something where I can point a domain to a load balancer instance (but if it needs to be restarted and changes instance URL, the domain no longer points to the right one?) so I can essentially run an entire site/app off of EC2. But then again it's probably better off to make a regular server be the load balancer I'm guessing.
Since EC2 doesn't have persistent hdd - where do ppl keep databases? Not on S3 the latency would be up there.. in RAM on EC2?
I pre-ordered the O'Reilly EC2/S3 book months ago.. it should be shipping in March I think.
Those who use DB on EC2 (from what I read on the web) just don't restart their instance and make backups to S3.
EC2 for Python programmers http://jimmyg.org/2007/09/01/amazon-ec2-for-people-who-prefe...