Don’t you think the lines you’re currently reading look somewhat geekier than before? They should, because they’ve been generated in the cloud. The last three years or so, 4sysops ran on a dedicated server in a datacenter in Berlin. A few days ago, I moved everything to Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) in the U.S. In this series, I describe the reasons behind this decision.

I was quite content with my German provider Strato; everything worked flawlessly, and I never had hardware problems with my server. Some days ago, 4sysops was down for an hour or so, but that was the fault of my domain provider, Domaindiscount24. I always separate domain and server provider, so I can change the provider easily without having to move the domain.

Linux for a Windows blog

4sysops has run on an openSUSE Linux box for the last few years. You might ask why a blog for Windows admins runs on Linux. The reason is that I am a big fan of WordPress, which is probably the best weblog software out there. WordPress can be installed on Windows, but it harmonizes better with a LAMP system. Besides, I think every Windows admin should speak a little Linux too.

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In my last post I described my experience of moving 4sysops to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as being not really positive. EC2′s smallest instance type was way too small to handle 4sysops. The number one argument for cloud computing that analysts put forward are costs savings. Let’s see if cost savings were the key factor on my decision.

A while back, I outlined in detail why pay-as-you-go pricing makes cloud computing expensive. This also applies to EC2. Amazon has realized, meanwhile, that they can’t really compete with on-premise computing with such high prices and introduced so-called reserved instances. With this option, you pay a one-time fee in order to get a discount on the hourly usage for the duration of the term. There are yearly terms and three-year terms. Of course, this is not a typical pay-as-you-go pricing, since you can only “go” at the end of the term. However, the advantage is that it significantly reduces costs

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In the last post in this series, I outlined why costs savings were not the reason for moving 4sysops to the cloud. On the contrary, I could have saved money if I had chosen a dedicated server. So what were the reasons? Another argument you hear often is that cloud computing scales better than other environments.

Cloud scalability

In the first post of this series, I described how I figured out that the Amazon’s small EC2 instance was not powerful enough to host 4sysops. The good thing about EC2 is that I could easily launch a more powerful virtual machine. If I had ordered a new server at a conventional provider, for example, and realized that the machine was too small, then things would have been a lot more complicated. With EC2, I simply launched a second, more powerful, instance of my private AMI (OS image) and moved the IP address to the new instance. Thus, it didn’t cost me extra work time to upgrade to a bigger machine. Furthermore, moving the IP to the new instance was only a matter of seconds, so there was no downtime.

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