In December 2015 I received an e-mail with the following subject line from AWS, around 4 am in the morning:
"Amazon EC2 Instance scheduled for retirement"
When I checked the logs it was clear the hardware failed 30 mins before they scheduled it for retirement. EC2 and root device data was gone. The e-mail also said "you may have already lost data".
So I know that Amazon schedules servers for retirement after they already failed, green check doesn't surprise me.
So just as a FYI the reason that probably happened to you is that the underlying host was failing. I am assuming they wanted to give you a window to deal with it but the host croaked before then. I've been dealing w/ AWS for a long long time and I've never seen a maintenance event go early unless the physical hardware actually died...
Not saying my scale is the the same at all - but the fact they can't do something so simple that I can do it as a single individual is embarrassing at best.
Simple solutions to this do scale - Linode and DigitalOcean don't have such issues for example - and while they're not Amazon scale, they are quite large and I'd say they prove the concept.
EBS data is backed up in multiple redundant ways (using erasure encoding I think).
Local storage is not intended for permanent storage, and is more use at your own risk. That's also why most of the new EC2 instances don't even support local storage.
That's the cost of a new 500GB SSD per month! For the cost of three months' EBS storage and a couple of hours you could setup your own RAID array with a spare for backups and possibly get better uptimes than Amazon :P
Actually, you can get way more than 3-5x better IOPS on your own SSD! Different types of storage have different types of trade-offs. EBS is great for some things, slow and overpriced for others...
Huh? What kind of 500 GB SSD costs $50?
And again--500 GB on EBS is not stored on 500 GB of flash...they use erasure coding and distribute it over ~3x as much, roughly.
Oh, and good luck creating snapshots of your home RAID!
Definitely not $50 to my knowledge but for ~$170 you can get a Samsung 850 EVO which is rated for 98k IOPS. They're fairly reliable drives and much, much faster than anything you'll get on EBS. You could be running that full 3x replication in less than a year of paying for EBS.
> Oh, and good luck creating snapshots of your home RAID!
LVM, ZFS and Btrfs all do snapshotting quite nicely. FreeNAS - commonly used for consumer grade NASes will automatically manage ZFS snapshots for you too. Amazon will sell you extra space to store snapshots, sure, but increasing the size of your devices usually solves that problem. And quite cost effectively as you can probably tell by now...
...and Dropbox can be replaced with SFTP and rsync.
Can you roll your own? Sure. Will it work as reliably and effectively as EBS? Can I scale it easily? How many people are comfortable using snapshots on their own?
It's tried and true tech that any competent ops person can use quite easily. Been around much longer than EBS quite frankly.
Dropbox targets end users who don't have the knowledge required to use the alternative, if you're smart enough to use EBS you're probably smart enough to use ZFS snapshotting just as easily. Or could within a day or two. It's really not that hard.
Like I said, there are systems that pretty much manage the whole thing for you and just warn you when something is about to blow up like FreeNAS.
In practice, it's actually fine for most purposes. It's equivalent to multiple striped 15K RPM magnetic disks, which used to be high-end enterprise storage a few years ago.
>It is, yes, but I wouldn't refer to it as comparable to an SSD.
EBS (gp2) is flash based, has far better performance than high end magnetic disks, with excellent latency and consistent performance. So, it's more comparable to SSD than anything else.
>Surprisingly not! Testing in ATTO I got read and write speeds that were almost identical, and a peak of 2000 IOps.
Really? Were you looking at 4K write? Typically that would be under 1 MB/s for an SD card.
It's not just a RAID that can fail. And everyone who uses AWS should expect failures. You should build your infrastructure to handle such failures well.
"Amazon EC2 Instance scheduled for retirement"
When I checked the logs it was clear the hardware failed 30 mins before they scheduled it for retirement. EC2 and root device data was gone. The e-mail also said "you may have already lost data".
So I know that Amazon schedules servers for retirement after they already failed, green check doesn't surprise me.