ColdFusion in the Clouds with Amazon EC2

I’m creating this post so that can remember of couple of things for when I dig into ColdFusion cloud computing with Amazon EC2.

Adam Howitt’s presentation from 11/2207: https://admin.na3.acrobat.com/_a204547676/p95696588/

Walks you through using CF via EC2, though it may be out of date.

This comment from a blog on why you might (or might not) want to use EC2:


Amazon is not trying to compete in the same market as HostMySite or any of the other main ISPs. What their computing grid allows is the ability to scale your system by the hour. If you will be running one server (or two servers, or n servers) all the time because you need them up for reasons OTHER then scalability, then EC2 is not for you.
EC2 is perfect when your application (or parts of it) have long periods of nearly no work to do. If you have enough of your own hardware to handle peak usage, then your machines will be seriously underutilized the rest of the time.
Imagine a system that receives data, does a fair amount of processing, and then makes the processing results available on a website. Put the website (including the system to receive data) on your own servers. Then use EC2 servers to do the processing. When there is no data to process, you pay $0. When you have data, you can spin up as many servers as you need to get the job done. 10 hours of 1 machine, or 1 hour with 10 machines cost the same. This allows you to build a very performant system for very cheap.
When doing cost comparisons, make sure to understand the market they are competing in. When building systems with a fluctuating workload, you simply can't beat EC2.

- Sam Curren


Huh, so maybe Cloud Computing does not equal Virtual Web Hosting. Maybe the solution to avoid in-house server headaches is not Clout Computing, but rather subscription Virtual Hosting.