So we’ve decided to switch to Amazon’s EC2 for our hosting. Not that we’re unhappy with the service that Bytemark have been providing for our cluster, but EC2 offers a degree of flexibility, and hardware fault tolerance that you just can’t get when you manage the underlying virtual instances yourself. We’ll be making the switch for most of our hosted services just after Christmas.
The one thing that EC2 could do with is a fully fault-tolerant solution for clustered websites. We’re not able to truly factor out the single point of failure when load balancing. We’re getting round this by keeping another load balancer up and running as a spare, and automatically remapping the IP addresses should the first load balancer go down.
This will cause a maximum of a few minutes outage in the event of any server hardware failure, which is better than our existing setup, but it sure would be nice if EC2 handled this for you…
Having said that we’re pretty happy with the way EC2 works. I’m a full believer in the concept of Utility Computing – eventually computing power could well be provided in much the same way electricity is today…