Amazon Web Services: EC2 in North California

January is going crazy for me down here in Moscow, lot’s of stuff happening, loads of work. No time to tweet, not time to blog. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I quit my job at GSL and now working at a new local startup. I’ll make sure to announce it as soon as the website is alright, so stay tuned ;) Anyways, as I wrote back in December, I’m moving all my stuff to the new EC2 in the Northern California region, and I guess I can say that I’m finally done.

The process is not too different from simply moving to a new dedicated hosting or to a new EC2 instance in the same region, though there are a few nuances. I was surprised to note that the S3 Fox plugin for Firefox haven’t yet added the new region (Europe is present though). I thought it might not work for some reason (S3 and EC2 being in different regions), but hopefully it does. I also considered using the good old mod_php for Apache instead of running mod_suphp which gave me a tiny boost in performance. All the configurations were straightforward, copy from one EC2, paste into the other. Not without a few changes of course.

I also had a change in the Elastic IP address, but hey that was whitelisted by Twitter! So I guess I’ll have to write to them again for the new whitelisting. Oh well.. One more interesting thing is that I’m now running on an EBS-backed instance, which was introduced by Amazon not so long ago. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting my stuff lost on a terminate or a rebooted machine as the whole drive is being dumped into an EBS. So backups are now completely instant via the AWS Management Console, they’re called Snapshots, takes one click and a few minutes ;) Now if I’d like to terminate one EC2 instance and start the whole thing over on another one, I’d just restore from EBS or Snapshot! Unless, of course, I decide to move to another region. I believe EBS blocks and Snapshots are restricted to regions, furthermore, EBS and EC2 compatibility are restricted to a certain zone in one region, which is obvious. I wouldn’t like to run an EC2 instanced in one data center, backed by a hard drive located in a different one.

Another good question would be Amazon CloudFront. Well, since the S3 buckets haven’t changed, CloudFront should work the way it used to despiting the move. Or at least I hope so ;)