Amazon Web Services Blog

Hi,

There are several discussion threads here acknowledging that while EC2 doesn’t support static IPs, there are ways to get around this that give sufficient functionality and reliability such that EC2 can be used as a reliable web host for highly available applications. Several companies have sprung up providing hosting on top of EC2 that claim high levels of reliability.

I would like to list what my requirements are and why I don’t think any of these other solutions would work for me and what I think *would* work for me. I write this so Amazon doesn’t get the impression that *all* of their potential customers’ needs are taken care of by the existing EC2 feature set.

My requirements are highly available web hosting. If one of my web servers goes down for some reason, either maintenance or it explodes, I don’t want my customers to notice.

Existing solutions I have read about with EC2 talk about using round-robin DNS and how Internet Explorer will handle choosing a server that works among the A records listed and it will only take 1 1/2 minutes tops to recover. To me that is not acceptable. If Google.com is unavailable to 1/3 of their customers for 90 seconds, I imagine that a siren goes off and people start moving quickly to fix things. These existing solutions would appear to be acceptable for low volume sites. And please correct me if my assumptions are wrong here. (If they are, I’m sure someone will).

What I want is static IPs and the ability for a virtual IP (VIP) to be taken over by different servers in my EC2 cluster. This way, I can have 2 EC2 instances to be my pair of linux load balancers and a bunch of other EC2 instances as web servers. The passive load balancer watches the active and takes over the VIP when the active goes down. In practice, the down time can be seconds or less and all of those other good things.

If there are existing solutions using the existing EC2 feature set that can give this level of reliability and where there isn’t one single point of failure “that doesn’t really go down very often”, then I’d love to be enlightened.

I would also love to use EC2 for all of my hosting needs. I like the company and I like the innovative things they are doing. Amazon has certainly pushed some interesting changes into the hosting industry in the time since first S3 and now EC2 have launched. And I can see using EC2 for some things, just not everything yet.

Thank you,

Michael Wang-Helmke