We have been doing some work with with Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) which allows us to create virtual machines in the cloud in a few seconds. These are great for hosting websites, and what’s cool about them is that if you get Slashdotted or experience a similar unexpected spike in traffic you can create new hosts immediately. Recently Amazon added a new service called Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) which can distribute load across hosts. We’ve been looking at this for some of our recent development and infrastructure projects.

I just read this description of how ELB works by Shlomo Swidler from his Cloud Developer Tips blog. It’s a great reference.

You pay for ELB by usage just like everything else at AWS. From Amazon: “You are charged at $0.025 per hour for each Elastic Load Balancer, plus $0.008 per GB of data transferred through an Elastic Load Balancer.” For reference, on a deployment project in 2008 our Engineering team used a Cisco load balancer which I imagine cost a few thousand bucks.

Cost isn’t the only advantage. These can be created and destroyed quickly and remotely, allowing us to work more efficiently and spend less time visiting data centers in the middle of nowhere. This leads to improved quality of service for our clients as we can spend more time consulting on future technology growth plans and less time troubleshooting servers in cold, loud data centers.

This blog post brought to you by the iced coffee I am enjoying in the comfort and quiet of my office while deploying virtual machines!

Coffee Status = Yellow
2lbs in office – 10lbs next week. Please brew responsibly.

• Green = Surplus
• Yellow = Limited Coffee Grounds
• Orange = Last Pot
• Red = No coffee

And thanks, Dave, for this graph illustrating Amount of Coffee in Office and its relationship to Office Panic Level.

Amount of Coffee in Office and its relationship to Office Panic Level