Friday, March 7, 2008  Scaling at 2am with EC2  I really like
Amazon EC2. Hosting companies everywhere should be learning
about virtualization and web services, because this kind of
thing is clearly the future of managed hosting.  This past
Tuesday, I posted about my project on news.YC. To my surprise,
it got a lot of attention. Traffic increased by 1000x. That
still amounts to only a modest amount of traffic, but the
increase was very sudden, and I'm the only one working on the
site. And as it turned out, I had a serious bug in my backend
execution servers. I managed to keep the site working most of
the time anyway, though, because EC2 saved my bacon.  First, a
couple details about the architecture:'s backend untrusted-code-
execution servers run in heavily firewalled virtual machines on
Amazon EC2 instances (which are themselves firewalled and
virtual -- it's like turtles all the way down or something.) The
web frontend, running on a traditional colocated server,
transmits code to the backend and gets output