[lug] cloud recommendation

[Chris McDermott]

Paul,

Amazon and Rackspace are probably the biggest players in this market right
now, but Microsoft and others are getting into it as well.  My
recommendation would be for Amazon's EC2 cloud.  There are CentOS images
(AMI's) available - if you want to get up and running quickly I'd search for
the Rightscale ones.  You can also get a fully licensed Red Hat image for
EC2.  Some images are "instance-store" backed, meaning that data is not
persistent.  If you stop the instance (virtual server) and start it again,
all changes will be lost.  Others, however, are EBS-backed.  EBS stands for
Elastic Block Storage, and it's Amazon's way of providing semi-permanent
storage for your instances.  Basically, you create an EBS volume and it then
behaves rather like a traditional hard drive.  You can attach it to a
running instance, format it with a filesystem, etc.  The data is persistent
until you delete the EBS volume.  You can also take a snapshot of an EBS
volume at any time.  Instances that are EBS-backed *are* persistent, and you
can stop and restart them without losing changes.  The downside is that you
pay for EBS storage in addition to the per-minute running time of your
instance.  However, personally, I think that the small extra cost is well
worth it.

Chris

PS. dio2002, I don't believe anyone recorded the recent BLUG talk
unfortunately =[
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