Thread: New ML Site running on Amazon EC2

We just launched a site for one of our clients on ML 7.1 (will be upgrading to 8 soon enough).

http://www.naturalbundles.com/

This is also our first site running completely on Amazon's EC2 environment. We built some custom tools to take snapshots (backups) of the machine and can quite easily spin up another server with the appropriate configuration in case of catastrophe.

Not sure if anybody else out there is toying with EC2, but it's working quite well so far!

nicely done. Waiting for some Mosso Cloud customers to chime in here also

Thanks!

I'm hoping to post a bit of a "guide" detailing some of the gotchas with hosting in the cloud (on EC2 anyway). There were a handful that caused us some initial pain.

If anybody out there has problems / questions, post it here and I can try and lend a hand.

your site has very nice UI & is very responsive, did you do this all through customized Xml Packages?

Customized XML Packages is just part of it. The nice thing with ASPDNSF is you can do quite a bit just by creating custom XML packages.

We have a few custom SQL add ons as well. Queries, sprocs, views to help get the information out of the database in a way that makes it easier to work with for this particular site.

We also have a number of modifications that we made to the source code (and are still working on a few more for that particular client).

I should mention we didn't make many modifications to improve performance of the site. This is just a good example of what a dedicated (semi) server can do for your site and how well native ASPDNSF responds.

If you're on latest build, the "cloud" should have been automagic...we made a few changes to accommodate it.

Very interesting!

I have a rough question re costs ;p What sort of costs are you seeing with using ec2? How does it compare with a vps or dedicated server?

Ballpark ranges are acceptable!!

What were the main gotchas of installing under EC2?

Ben

Pricing is 12-1/2 cents per Instance per hour, so roughly $90/month per server, plus the cost of S3 storage. For that cost, you get a fat data pipe and your own licensed copy of Windows Server 2003. But the database runs on the same server as the website (potential PCI compliance problem), and without integrated load balancing, you're limited to a single server per URL.

I'd recommend you also check out Mosso. With them, your database runs on a separate server, and your application runs in a true cloud. They spin-up additional instances of your website when your demand grows (or when you get slashdotted), all handled by their load balancer.

Are there any gotchas running with load balancers? We're trying to launch a site and having issues with sessions when going from http to https, sometimes the users gets moved form one server to another.

make sure you have sticky sessions loaded. but i'll also wait for our Dev to chime in here now.

There are options for load balancing with Amazon EC2. Plenty of discussion on the EC2 forums around this.

Also, separating the web & db servers is quite easy. We run two instances and restrict access to the db server to only allow connections from our web server. No problemo!

I'm not for or against either EC2 or Mosso. I think Cloud computing is a nice option for hosting and each provider has their ups/downs.

One thing I didn't like about Mosso was (taken from their site):

"SSH access and Remote Desktop Protocol are not available at this time (you can run cron jobs, set permissions, uncompress files, however); API access is also not available at this time"

Having the API access on EC2 helps automate a # of jobs, but like I said above, each service has their ups/downs.

If anybody out there is thinking about cloud computing, look at each service provider carefully and choose the one that meets your needs.

Cool. maybe we should be posting there (in the amazon forums also)?

Not sure if that's sarcasm ?

Was just sharing info!

not at all. if issues are being discussed there, we should be there...your input was greatly appreciated (seriously). we're talking with Amazon now anyway, so it's good timing.

I'd also like to hear more about load balancing Windows servers with EC2. I haven't seen this discussed in their forums.

i've been on Mosso for about a month now, here are a few things...
1. caching causes a headache for developers. to resest the cache, you have to actually delete web.config from server, then re-upload web.config.
2. speed is questionable. i'm not sure if my site is just heavy or if the cloud is not as fast as i would like (www.pinupshoes.com)
3. no remote access
4. support is awesome
5. admin interface is sweet
6. price: $100/month + $5/month for every 10mb of MS SQL
7. they do NOT run automatic SQL backups. you have to create your own cron job to do nightly backups
8. you don't have SA access to database to do backups, restores, unlock stored procedures, etc. you have to use their web SQL interface tool which is very time consuming.

dev guys.... anyone know how to solve this caching issue on cloud? its such a time waster to delete web.config and reupload every time. ugh

We've been running a little over a month now on Mosso after running into a lot of issues with setting it up originally. Right now we're seriously considering Amazon EC2 as an alternative. Ever since the site migration to RackSpace mosso we been getting the 2 dreaded errors on there.

1. No suitable nodes are available to serve your request.
2. Gateway error

Rackspace will tell you it's due to their load balancer timeout period giving you these error messages and tell you to optimize your code / app. Sometimes our showproduct.aspx page takes roughly 3-7 seconds to load so we seriously do not think that the ASPDNSF ML v8.12 code is an issue. Only areas that could be a cause is when you're doing search (we have over 15K products on our website) or when you're running something intensive.

Toofast, have you tried to click on Rebuild Application through their control panel interface for the caching issue?

I agree with toofast on some issues below. Their support is great but we haven't been too impress with the hosting service and the speed. We thought Rackspace was going to be solid but we had moments of downtime when one of their nodes on their clusters went bad. The My SQL Little Admin (MLA) panel they have for managing the database is horrible. Every time we need to do a DB backup, we have to use that tool and perform the backup. Downloading it from that interface is risky since if it goes bad and you're downloading 1GB DB through the browser, you can't continue. Each time we have to call Rackspace to zip up our DB backup file and upload it to our FTP server for download. This makes deployment of new features to the site much more time consuming.

If you're thinking about a cloud hosting setup, do NOT use Rackspace Cloud. I can't speak to their regular hosting service since we never tried that, but in terms of Cloud hosting, they're definitely not production-ready and you'll waste countless hours with their customer support. They're plagued with the 2 dreadful errors that 96spec mentioned above 1) Nodes not available to process your request, and 2) proxy error / Bad gateway.

If you have anything over 3000+ products, you'll have trouble running the following:
1. Can't generate GoogleBase product feed (or any other feeds such as Amazon, PriceGrabber, etc, for that matter) because running the feed on a DB of 3000+ products will take more than 60 sec to complete. The more products, the longer.
2. Can't import products using Excel batch import or XML batch import for the same reason above. Running any import with more than a few hundred products will choke up their load balancer.
3. Search text box will choke for the same reason if you have a large product DB
4. Any other batch/bulk process that return or process a large amount of data will choke.

We had to devise local or workaround solution to deal with the 3 issues above, but we'll be moving off Rackspace as soon as possible in the next few weeks.

We migrated to Rackspace Cloud (formerly Mosso) because AspDotNetStorefront touted compatibility with them on a press release (http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/n...howarticle=139). I wonder if ASPDNSF ever tested Rackspace Cloud with a real DB of more than 10000+ products before making that press release. A test DB with 100 test product will pass, but any thriving ecommerce site will have more than 100 products.

Hope this helps anyone considering moving to Rackspace Cloud. The name changes, but the terrible quality remains same. Good customer service won't be necessary if it works in the first place.