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Good reasons to host inelastically on EC2

Recently, there’s been a bit of discussion online about whether or not it makes sense for companies to host server infrastructure at Amazon EC2, or on traditional colo infrastructure. Generally, these discussions have focussed on one main selling point of EC2: its elasticity, the ability to horizontally scale the number of server instances at a moment’s notice.

If you’re in a position to gain from elasticity, that’s great. But it is still worth noting that even if you aren’t in that position, there’s another good reason to host at an EC2-like cloud; if you want to deploy another copy of the app, either from a different version-control branch (dev vs staging vs production deployments), or to run separate apps with customizations for different customers. These aren’t scaling an existing app up, they’re creating new copies of the app, and EC2 works nicely to do this.

If you can deploy a set of servers with one click from a source code branch, this is entirely viable and quite useful.

Another reason: EC2-to-S3 traffic is extremely fast and cheap compared to external-to-S3. So if you’re hosting your data on S3, EC2 is a great way to crunch on it efficiently. Update: Walter observed this too on the backend for his Twitter Mosaic service.

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