NYCPHP Meetup

[Hans Zaunere]

> does anyone have any experience with amazon ec2 cloud?..
> It sounds cheap and like the next best thing since sliced bread.. Has
> anyone tried this beyond a dev environment?

I don't have anything in production on it, but have played with it
considerably.  It's Xen virtualization.  I've built images, done the
provisioning dance, configuration, etc.  And talked with their product
manager about some new functionality that they need to make it a realistic
hosting platform.

> With PHP code of course..

Their provisioning system is all Java that I think hits a XML web service,
but of course this could be tweaked.  The web service looked
straightforward, but I didn't spend the time developing any code for it.

The biggest problem I had with it is price.  It comes out to about
$230/month for the base package, and that doesn't even include storage or
bandwidth.  For that type of money, I'd rather have dedicated servers at a
top-tier provider.

The other issue is accounting of usage.  Long story short, it's quite
difficult to accurately which VM is using how much resources.  When
providing hosting, then, this makes it difficult to set prices accordingly.
This is what I discussed with their product manager, and I'm apparently not
the first to bring this up with him.

>From speaking with him, it certainly is a interesting service, and at some
point, probably will be the wave of the future.  However, I got a very
"experimental" feel from him.  This perhaps is highlighted by their SLA and
some recent - and significant - outage problems.  At the end of the day, the
price point just didn't make sense and I'm focused back to good old regular
hosting.

---
Hans Zaunere / President / New York PHP
    www.nyphp.org  /  www.nyphp.com