Newbie to Amazon AWS, setup question [closed]

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Background: I'm an ASP.NET developer with not much of experience when it开发者_运维问答 comes to server administration.

I researched high and low on Amazon AWS and I think we are going to go with the "Reserved Small Instance". My questions are the following

1. Due to pricing of MS SQL server is too expensive, we are going to use MySQL. Now, do you install Mysql yourself, on the same instance or a different one, on EBS or not EBS? Is there a windows AMI with mysql for free? I can't seem to find any.

2. It seems, if you install MySQL yourself, you will have to handle all the backup, load balancing yourlsef correct? Any tutorials out there that teach you that? and what's your experience with Amazon RDS for a fee? How is the price of RDS working out for you?

3. Given I have very little experiences when it comes to server administration, dumb question. Is there a need for me to order load balancing even if I just buy "Small Instance"? You would need at least two machines to load balance as I understand it right? Or "Small Instance", buy one plan, you can create as many "machine" as you need? A bit confused.

4. Could someone give me an estimate of how much 1GB bandwidth is in terms of traffic, mostly text, non graphic intensive (like Google plus ish)? Each page have a max of 100kb (with compressed javascript and all that)

5. Lastly, I have search functions using Lucene.NET, which stores search indexes as text on hard drive. From what I've read so far, if the instance is gone, your files are gone, so should I store that on EBS? or S3?

Thanks a lot for having the patience to read through the load of dumb questions. I really appreciate you taking the time to answer them.

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1 . Yes you can set it up yourself or go with their Amazon RDS setup like you mentioned. The downside of setting it up yourself is that you have to manage it all by yourself.

1. There's a bunch of tutorials out there on how to use Amazon RDS. But really all you need to do is go through the console and you can use the website to build the database. You also will need to define the correct security groups. Checkout the amazon developer site for instructions. The price is pretty expensive if your bootstrapping.

2. You would need to set up load balancing and trigger points yourself. However if you use the new ElasticBeanStalk service a lot of this is done for you and you can just add new trigger points on when to scale up and down and the instances will be added and removed from the load balancer accordingly.

3. hmmm don't know.

4. Not sure just based on that but ya you can store files on S3.

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1) typically you'd want your db installed on a different server, especially if you're going with a small instance. you may see performance problems running both web and db servers on the same instance. but it depends on your type of app and traffic.

2) http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Guide-MySQL-5/dp/1590595351/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322325409&sr=8-1 but i'd check out Xeround. i tested it. was dead simple to use. just make sue your ec2 instance is in the same zone as your xeround instance.

3) you'd need load balancing only if you if you're running more than 1 instance.

4) Not sure

5) i don't think you'd be able to read the index files using the s3 api the way you would need to for lucene. you might want to check out these guys: http://websolr.com/

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There's Xeround: http://xeround.com/cloud-database-comparison/amazon-rds-feature-comparison/

I read about them on mysqlperformanceblog.com

I'm thinking about moving there because I'm not willing to pay $80 a month either.