I want to keep this post fairly brief because there is so much stuff going on at XSPRADA lately that I find myself pressed for time from 6AM to midnight on a typical day which usually also includes weekends, but that’s the price you pay for building a revolution. Ask Fidel, he knows.

First of all, I finally had time last Sunday to record a screencast explaining how to install and setup our RDM/x software. In the process, I discovered that Camstudio and Microsoft Windows x64 decoder were my friends, reducing a 1.2GB video to 35Megs (phew!).

Second, I want to talk about my recent epiphany with EC2. Early this week I decided to see if I could install and run our Windows-based database engine RDM/x on some sort of cloud platform because I don’t think anyone in their right minds in enterprise software can afford to ignore this trend any longer. My purpose was certainly not to setup a full-fledged production system up there, but rather to setup a quick and dirty demonstration system so people could either duplicate or use it on the fly to test-drive our software, for example.

After poking around a bit I settled on Amazon’s EC2. They seemed like the only “big-time” player supporting WinTel boxes (our software runs on 64-bit Windows Server 2003 and 2008) and they have enough credibility and market “karma” at this point to alleviate most basic concerns about reliability and security. So after checking out possible configuration tools and hitting our CEO up for some plastic, I signed up for EC2 and started exploring this brave new world.

It turns out EC2 is really several “platform” components comprising: the actual EC2 O/S instance (a VM blade) known as an AMI (Amazon Machine Instance), persistent storage called EBS (Elastic Block Store) which presents as “volumes” you mount onto the AMI, and persistent (hot/cold) storage (also used for EBS snapshots) called S3. There’s also a queuing system called SQS but that didn’t enter my mix. Confused yet? It’s not that bad once you get used to it J

For the configuration tooling, you can use command line tools (which I suspect most *NIX/LAMP people prefer), a FireFox pluggin, or the web-based AWS (Amazon Web Services) Console. I used both of the latter to compare.

I brought up one of the standard Windows AMI as a Windows 2003 R2 64-bit datacenter server. I actually tried two different instance types. One extra-large standard with 15GB of RAM and 4 cores, and one large high-CPU with 7GB of RAM and 8 cores. I found better performance on the 4 core box with twice the RAM so I ended up sticking to that one.

For credentials, you need to generate a key-pair, and then plug in the private part into a dialog box which then spits out an admin password for the new instance. You then connect remotely to your instance using Remote Desktop Connection (or SSH if you’re talking to a *nix instance).

Right off the bat my instance came with four attached 500GB “hard drives”. These volumes are more like flash drives I think. This is not persistent storage but it’s pretty darn fast. For “real” storage you need to create Elastic Block Storage (EBS) “volumes” and attach them to your instance. So I did just that and slapped 4 additional 500GB drives to my box, and then converted each drive to an NTFS mount point (because this is best practice for our particular application). Unfortunately, I extracted a maximum 22-25MB/sec I/O to and from these volumes. I had read somewhere that these dynamic “block devices” were more like instant SANs but in fact, Amazon Silver Support (another pay-for service but well worth it if you ask me) stated the following to me in an email:

“Even though it presents a block interface, EBS isn't intended to be equivalent to fibre-channel SAN storage. The performance you should expect from EBS would more closely align with a NAS device. You can stripe several EBS devices together for higher I/O rates, but your rates will be limited by various shared components in the system, including the network between your instance and the storage servers. Larger instance types will typically see better performance than smaller instance types.”

“More closely align with a NAS device”. Huh oh. That means gating at the NIC level. The systems are clearly not setup for intense I/O data processing needs, at least not using the standard EC2 configuration models currently available. Nevertheless, I was still able to do sufficient work with sufficient data to build a reasonable “functional demo” machine. And that was my goal from the onset. Given this took me about 1.5 days to figure out, at an average cost of around $16/day (not including the additional Silver support fees) I am very impressed with this cloud platform to say the least and I’m sure Jeff Bezos is basking in the bliss of my endorsement :)

Quite honestly, this cloud business is no joke. I haven’t seen, heard and felt such a buzz around a new “platform” in the industry since I got my hands on Windows 3.0 in the early nineties. It was the same “oh my God” emotional feeling at the time, or DICEE as Guy Kawasaki likes to put it (Deep, Intelligent, Complete, Elegant and Emotive).