enStratus customers using the Amazon cloud woke up this morning to discover the new AWS Region in Northern California, us-west-1. AWS exposed this new region and its two availability zones overnight and launched a new feature, EBS boot volumes.
The New Region
Let's start with the new region. The Northern California region joins Northern Virginia (us-east-1) and Ireland (eu-west-1) to become the third region in the AWS cloud. Regions are distinct infrastructures with almost no common points of failure. If you deploy an application across two regions, you have essentially set yourself up to survive anything but the failure of Amazon as a company.
enStratus customers had access to this new region the moment Amazon made it public. As of this afternoon, the region had about 25 public AMIs (compared to 3,000+ in us-east-1). enStratus is working on pre-bundling images with the enStratus agent for the us-west-1 region. We expect to have the first images ready for Fedora tomorrow. You can always launch your own Windows or Fedora instances from the public images that currently exist in the region.
It's important to keep in mind that the us-west-1 region costs slightly more than the us-east-1 (but the same as the eu-west-1). The best use of the new region is for any application where compute latency to the east coast is an issue or where cross-region redundancy is important. You can also use enStratus + the new region to setup a DR solution within AWS that still resides in the United States.
EBS Boot Volumes
While the launch of the us-west-1 region is great news, the most important development last night was the introduction of EBS boot volumes. In short, you can use EBS volumes to boot up EC2 instances instead of using an AMI. In other words, AWS now provides the benefits of persistent compute instances without the complexity normally associated with persistent compute instances.
Later this month, enStratus will add support for EBS boot volumes. We'll make it more interesting, however, early in 2010 when we incorporate EBS boot volumes in the Cluster Manager. We'll enable you to associate boot snapshots with server groups and then—with a click of a button—scale a server vertically to a larger RAM or more powerful CPU instance without bringing your system down.
Update: Actually, enStratus already supports boot from EBS. When you select an EBS AMI, the new instance will launch with an EBS volume as the root. What we will add in the near future is the ability to pause these servers without terminating them and restart them at a later time.
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