Re: Amazon High I/O instances

On 8/21/2012 7:10 AM, Oliver Kohll - Mailing Lists wrote:
>
> This is a general 'cloud or dedicated' question, I won't go into it
> but I believe cloud proponents cite management ease, scalability etc.
> I'm sure there's a place for every type of hosting. However I would be
> interested in hearing some experiences of PostgreSQL on an Amazon high
> I/O instance, given a client has just proposed running on one. If
> there are none forthcoming in the short term I may be in a position to
> provide some results myself in a month or two.
>

Amazon don't say what vendor's SSDs they are using, which is a little
worrying to me -- when we deployed our SSD-based machines last year,
much work was done to address the risk of write endurance problems. Now,
an AWS instance and its ephemeral storage isn't expected to live forever
(keep that in mind when storing data on one!)
so perhaps one can ignore write endurance as a concern in this case
since we'd already be worried about (and have a plan to address) "entire
machine endurance".

For sure performance on these instances for any I/O limited application
is going to be great.
I have a friend who is looking at them for his "big data" analytics
application which spends most of its time sorting Tb sized files.