[lug] cloud recommendation

[Rob Nagler]

Paul Nowosielski writes:
> Could anyone recommend a good and reliable company that offers Centos or
> Redhat please?

I started playing around with EC2 this week.  They offer AMI (among
other distros), which is a RedHat derivative.  I really like AMI.
They've stripped out all the crap so you get a *server*, not something
with HAL, GPM, RHN, bla, bla, bla.  It does have the LVM, which I'm
not fond of, but you gotta give up something to get something.  You
have to install packages to do pretty much anything (even apache
wasn't installed), but then you can take a snapshot and replicate it.

I like AMI so much that I'd like to figure out how to download it to
local machines.  Amazon doesn't make this easy afaict.  You can upload
images quite easily.  They also have a public image repository where
anybody can upload an image.

It's not easy to get started with EC2.  They give you like 4 different
sets of credentials, and it's tough to figure out which is which.  Or,
at least, for me. :)  People have figured it out, and there are easy
instructions.

There are some gotchas, like your images are not backed up.  If an
instance crashes, you lose everything unless you've snapshotted it.
You have to use EBS or S3 (haven't figured out the difference yet) to
store your data to get backups.

You can't beat the price.  The SLA is 99.95%, which may mean nothing.
I'm always nervous about trusting the complexity of running the whole
computer to somebody else, but for the price, I can afford to buy in
different "regions", and hope that they are run independently enough
that our applications won't be down for long.

We're going to move some production stuff to EC2 over the coming
months.

Rob