Amazon Web Services

[tpearl5]

Has anyone setup vbulletin using Amazon web services. If so, how it is working? How did you do it?

[royo]

The prices for it are pretty high, even for a pay-as-you go service. You would need to use EC2, S3 and probably SimpleDB, which would be somewhat slow if your forum has a larger activity. How come you are looking to set something like this up on Amazon Web Services? Do your needs really extend very high in terms of scalability?

[tpearl5]

I thought the prices were pretty good.

I'm adding some sections to the site soon that will require some more resources.

[royo]

Compared to having it all on a more powerful server, using AWS will be slower, even though you might save a little bit here and there, some of the resources such as disk I/O will be shared.

[Andy Huang]

Only thing I'd consider throwing over to S3 would be large attachments (IE: videos/music/zip archive/large pdf files etc.). Anything else are probably too important to rely off of third party...

[allwin]

I would love to move computing to the cloud for the following reasons - we are a growing company and very soon we would need more than 4/5 servers and as we continue to grow we'd need load balancers and the full monty. The challenge and expenses of maintaining such systems are huge including the cost of the techs.

Something like AWS helps keep the infrastructure scalable & manageable and much cheaper than what it would take if we went at it alone.

Even now we lease servers, I don't see why I wouldn't trust the database to run on amazon's servers. Heck, I may be able to snapshot and save more copies of my sites than ever before.

[royo]

I doubt you'll be able to see the same performance from Amazon. What kind of hardware setup do you have running right now, and what are your forums' statistics ?

[allwin]

Right now we use dual cpu quad core machines for the DB and similar for the front end. My trouble is we are growing very fast and will soon hit 5 - 7000 users online at any point and we would rather scale at will than manage a multiple server setup ..

[royo]

Took you a bit to answer, let us know how it went.... I doubt you can really scale with amazon aws when it comes to speed, but who knows...

[allwin]

Royo, we haven't done this yet. But we are looking to go ahead and do it. For now our dev team is working on applications that will scale on AWS. So everything we now write is keeping in mind growth, but we still haven't found a good/possible way to scale vB

[royo]

What is the main bottleneck when clustering up several servers?

[allwin]

As a company, we work on multiple applications. Have developers working on multiple products and we are trying to make sure they have enough access to processing power & bandwidth at will. It is easier to build applications from ground up to use AWS - however porting something like vB is not easy.

In terms of bottleneck - we do not want to spent a ton of time managing hardware and also we would really like the ability to scale at will. With AWS we can do say backups at will and a ton of other things much faster & with more redundancy