This program creates an EBS snapshot for an Amazon EC2 EBS volume. To
help ensure consistent data in the snapshot, it tries to flush and
freeze the filesystem(s) first as well as flushing and locking the
database, if applicable.

Filesystems can be frozen during the snapshot. Prior to Linux kernel
2.6.29, XFS must be used for freezing support. While frozen, a
filesystem will be consistent on disk and all writes will block.

There are a number of timeouts to reduce the risk of interfering with
the normal database operation while improving the chances of getting a
consistent snapshot.

If you have multiple EBS volumes in a RAID configuration, you can
specify all of the volume ids on the command line and it will create
snapshots for each while the filesystem and database are locked. Note
that it is your responsibility to keep track of the resulting snapshot
ids and to figure out how to put these back together when you need to
restore the RAID setup.

Handy!

fantastic in-depth presentation on EBS usage; lots of good advice here if you're using EBS volumes with/without PIOPS

mostly a DynamoDB puff-piece from last week's Amazon Cloud Connect, but contains some good real-world figures for a 20-billion-GUID deduping table use-case at end. ($4,150 per month, to cut to the chase)

the basics of running a service stack (web, app servers, data stores) on AWS. some good benchmark figures in the final slides

good docs from EC2

These notes are intended to help users and system administrators maximize TCP/IP performance on their computer systems. They summarize all of the end-system (computer system) network tuning issues including a tutorial on TCP tuning, easy configuration checks for non-experts, and a repository of operating system specific instructions for getting the best possible network performance on these platforms.

Some tips for maximizing HPC network performance for the intra-DC case; recommended by the LinkedIn Kafka operations page.

yeah yeah, Mongo. bookmarking for the good data on EBS+PIOPS

Scalr's thoughts on Google's EC2 competitor.

with Google Compute Engine, AWS has a formidable new competitor in the public cloud space, and we’ll likely be moving some of Scalr’s production workloads from our hybrid aws-rackspace-softlayer setup to it when it leaves beta. There’s a strong technical case for migrating heavy workloads to GCE, and I’ll be grabbing popcorn to eagerly watch as the battle unfolds between the giants.

Good interview with the Cassandra guys at Netflix, and some top Mongo-bashing in the comments

'an expressive toolset for constructing scalable, resilient [service] architectures. It works in the cloud, in the data center, and on your laptop, and it makes your system diagram visible and inevitable. Inevitable systems coordinate automatically to interconnect, removing the hassle of manual configuration of connection points (and the associated danger of human error).' Looks like a pretty neat cluster deployment tool; driven from a single configuration file, using Chef, integrating closely with AWS and providing many useful additional features

'an annual exploration of Amazon Web Services.' Some great hacks here

The web-app dev and ops best practices used by the Obama campaign's tech team. Some key tools: Puppet, EC2, Asgard, Cacti, Opsview, StatsD, Graphite, Seyren, Route53, Loggly, etc.

I missed this back in 2010; 500k active TCP connections to a single EC2 large instance using Java and NIO

something Chris Horn sent on -- using Puppet to build stacks and deploy to AWS using a simple point-and-click interface. looks cool

NetFlix' benchmarks -- impressively detailed. '48, 96, 144 and 288 instances', across 3 EC2 AZs in us-east, successfully scaling linearly

Rightscale CTO on last week's outage; pretty detailed, good round-up of useful commentary from around the web, too

interesting idea from Joe -- track your cloud-hosting spend in real-time