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We re looking at moving from our self-serviced, slightly fragile production system to a VPS provider or a cloud hosting serice like Amazon. Here is a list of technologies we currently use:

  1. Grails apps on glassfish
  2. MySQL
  3. Message Driven Beans on glassfish (no ESBs yet).
  4. Other perl and java processes, doing mostly DB related stuff.
  5. A large collection of files (~1 TB) being served up through our grails applications.
  6. Everything runs on Solaris/Linux.

We re looking at Amazon EC2 along with CloudFront/EBS/S3 and a VPS solution (Linode seems to stand out) ? Costs, though not a deal-breaker, are important to an extent (On a tight budget). Our current collection of a few Sun Servers (16 Gb RAM, Quad Core) just about suffice our needs.

Looking for any pitfalls with either Amazon or a VPS that we might face given the technologies we use.

ankimal
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1 Answers1

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While an EC2 instance will probabley cost you more overall, it does give you a number of options you won't get with a VPS.

  • First off, you can run OpenSolaris, it's pretty difficult to find VPS providers who will offer or support that.
  • You have the flexibility to re-configure your resources as and when you want to ensure your application is running as well as it can. It seems your a little unsure as to the hardware requirements of your app, if you specced a VPS and it turned out to be insufficient it can be expensive to increase the resources available .You can also tweak your EC2 instance to deal with peak times if you have them
Sam Cogan
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  • I love http://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/. Would that mean, that if one of glassfish servers started sucking memory, I dont really have to worry? – ankimal Jan 14 '10 at 21:40
  • Yep, although obviously its costing you more money, so you'd want to be aware of it! – Sam Cogan Jan 14 '10 at 22:13