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We have about 300 sites, but the combined IIS root content is about 1TB. We'd like to use route53 failover for load balancers in two AZ's in the same region, and have the IIS web heads come up and down in an autoscaling group as needed.

1TB is a little much to attach to each autoscaling instance especially when traffic starts bringing up several instances in each AZ.

We are using a seperate pair of DFS boxes at the moment to achieve this, but I really feel like there's a better/higher performance way to achieve this.

What should we use to provide the fastest and most reliable shared storage to our IIS autoscaled nodes that can be replicated accross AZ's if needed?

Thanks

3z33etm
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2 Answers2

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What about storing your files in S3. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

bennie j
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  • yeah, we want to do that eventually. It's the smartest way, but there are problems in the code preventing that. Looking for something as a stop gap in the meantime as we transition to S3. – 3z33etm Feb 17 '14 at 21:09
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Try using CloudFront, it will eventually distribute your static content in all AWS regions (or not, you can tune this).

Reducing the load at your servers and lowering the response latency. Using this service you will save your servers resources and have time to migrate the static content into S3.

In addition, CloudFront setup is very straightforward.

In the other hand, if you are willing to persist on trying to use shared storage, EBS (Elastic Block Storage) cannot be mounted in more than one instance at the same time, then you cannot use it, but you still have at least 2 alternatives:

  1. Create a new instance to be the fileserver, in this case you can try FreeNas or other equivalent solution, or even another windows server.
  2. You might try to use a driver to mount an S3 bucket as a share using TNTDrive or WinS3Fs.
Alessandro Oliveira
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  • oh...I didn't know that CloudFront can cache dynamic .net content. I thought it was just a distributred version of S3. I'll check it out....have you used it for dynamic web content, not just static images/html? – 3z33etm Feb 18 '14 at 23:44
  • Actually CloudFront acts like a reverse proxy, then dynamic content with the correct headers will not be cached. Yes we have several customers that rely on CloudFront. – Alessandro Oliveira Feb 23 '14 at 02:34