Category Archives: Amazon AWS

Garantia Testing asks “Does Amazon EBS Affect Redis Performance?”

The Redis mavins at Garantia  decided to find out whether EBS really slows down Redis when used over various AWS platforms.

Their testing and conclusions answer the question: Should AOF be the default Redis configuration?

We think so. This benchmark clearly shows that running Redis over various AWS platforms using AOF with a standard, non-raided EBS configuration doesn’t significantly affect Redis’ performance. If we take into account that Redis professionals typically tune their redis.conf files carefully before using any data persistence method, and that newbies usually don’t generate loads as large as the ones we used in this benchmark, it is safe to assume that this performance difference can be almost neglected in real-life scenarios.

Read the full post for all the details.


AWS Trusted Advisor Automates Security, Fault Tolerance, Cost Optimization Advice

Amazon’s Trusted Adviser tool, part of their paid premium support offerings, takes an automated look at a customer’s AWS environment with 10 checks covering security, fault tolerance, and cost optimization. Green, yellow, and red indicators help focus in on areas of concern (yellow) or of a critical nature (red).

This screencast tutorial gives a quick walkthrough and puts it in the context of related premium support features, like support staff interaction.


Benchmarking Redis on AWS: Is Amazon PIOPS Really Better than Standard EBS?

The Redis experts at Garantia Data did some benchmarking in the wake of Amazon’s announcement of

Their conclusion:

After 32 intensive tests with Redis on AWS (each run in 3 iterations for a total of 96 test iterations), we found that neither the non-optimized EBS instances nor the optimized-EBS instances worked better with Amazon’s PIOPS EBS for Redis. According to our results, using the right standard EBS configuration can provide equal if not better performance than PIOPS EBS, and should actually save you money.

Read the full post for details and graphs.


Introducing Cloud Service Dashboard of Dashboards

We’ve added a one-stop “dashboard of dashboards” that displays all the major cloud service dashboards on one page.

The page contains a “window” for each service status page or dashboard, with live, up-to-date info at a glance. Scroll for specific applications or locations, or click the link to jump to the full status page itself.

We included these services initially:

  • Amazon AWS
  • Google Apps
  • AppSpot
  • Microsoft Azure
  • RackSpace
  • Apple iCloud
  • Salesforce.com
  • Joyent
  • internet Pulse

Have we missed any? If we have leave a comment with the URL and we’ll try to add it.


Oracle Going Up Against Amazon with New Cloud Offerings

Oracle’s Larry Ellison once called cloud computing “Complete gibberish” but now Oracle is fully in the Cloud game with new announcements, which BusinessInsider covered in a story over the weekend.

There are two versions of Oracle’s new IaaS cloud. One is a “public cloud” similar to the kind of clouds offered by Amazon, Rackspace, HP, and others, where the hardware is located in Oracle’s data centers. It includes compute services and storage services, Ellison said.

The second is the so-called Oracle Private cloud, where a replica of Oracle’s public cloud is put in the customer’s own data center. Oracle would still own the hardware and be responsible for running it, securing it and updating it

Read the article.


CloudBerry Explorer Adds Amazon Glacier Support

CloudBerry Lab today released CloudBerry Explorer v.3.6, an application that allows users to manage files in Amazon S3 just as they would on their local computers.

In the new release CloudBerry S3 Explorer comes with support for Amazon Glacier, the recently introduced extremely low-cost storage.

From the new release CloudBerry S3 Explorer users can access and manage Amazon Glacier storage. Users can create vaults, move data to vaults and request to download them back to their computer. Users can create vaults in any of the available AWS regions.

Amazon Glacier is supported by both versions of CloudBerry Explorer: Freeware and PRO. Freeware version offers basic storage management capabilities such as browsing, creating, and deleting files, archives, vaults and uploading content from your PC to Glacier storage and vice versa. CloudBerry Explorer Freeware is available for download at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/free

PRO version offers some advanced features over Freeware version. It costs $39.99 per license and available for download at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/pro


How Amazon Glacier Confronts Entropy

Keeping data around — and readable — for a long, long, time is tough. For users Amazon’s Glacier offers freedom from specific hardware issues. We will no longer be stuck with unreadable zip drives or tapes. But that just moves the problem to Amazon. This interview talks about how they are tackling that problem.

The interview also touches on Amazon’s expectation that if they provide the back-end third-party developers will step and provide archiving and indexing tools.


Netflix Open Sources its Eureka Load Balancing Tool for AWS

Netflix has moved its Eureka mid-tier load-balancing tool, formerly known as the Netflix Discovery Service, to open source.Eureka Architecture Diagram

From the Netflix announcement of the move:

Eureka is a REST based service that is primarily used in the AWS cloud for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers. We call this service, the Eureka Server. Eureka also comes with a java-based client component, the Eureka Client, which makes interactions with the service much easier. The client also has a built-in load balancer that does basic round-robin load balancing. At Netflix, a much more sophisticated load balancer wraps Eureka to provide weighted load balancing based on several factors like traffic, resource usage, error conditions etc to provide superior resiliency. We have previously referred to Eureka as the Netflix discovery service.