Is anyone using Amazon's "Elastic Cloud" computing resource as a mechanism for hosting a DBISAM (or ElevateDB) database & if so is it practical, what are your experiences, how did you do it?

I am looking at best routes to server / hosting for databases shared between offices and in-the-field staff, and this option looks potentially scalable ... but I know very little about it beyond the hype.

Adam

Adam,

<< Is anyone using Amazon's "Elastic Cloud" computing resource as a
mechanism for hosting a DBISAM (or ElevateDB) database & if so is it
practical, what are your experiences, how did you do it? >>

I haven't used it, but my one concern would be the latency of each
request/response in such a setup.

We were recently contacted by our line provider about the possibility of
doubling our bandwidth for a little more money each month, so I was going to
send out an email to customers in order to gauge interest in possibly adding
this as a service that we provide (hosted DBISAM/ElevateDB servers).

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

<<so I was going to send out an email to customers in order to gauge
interest in possibly adding this as a service that we provide (hosted
DBISAM/ElevateDB servers). >>

Sounds good to me. A number of my clients also have the need to access their
DB remotely over the Internet. So far, I have not been able to find a
provider who could provide a hosted solution where i can run my DBISam
server and poke a few holes through their firewall so I'm quite interested
in this thread too.

At the moment, I'm more inclined at providing VPN as a solution for them. I
think a lot of my customers would prefer a hosted solution though if there
was one so they don't have to bother about setting up and maintaining a
Windows server, VPN and DB server.

Really exciting news. Hope there's enough support to make it happen. Will
wait for your email but here's my spur of the moment wish list :

1. Near 100% server and connection uptime .

2. An option for end-users to backup and download their DB would be
important.

3. Oh, and reseller/affiliate accounts would be nice to have too if possible
.

Regards
Gregory Sebastian

Note that Amazon offer a "cloud VPN" as well (so you can create a link from your local network to a shared drive on their cloud) ...

I was at a day with Embarcadero yesterday & they spent a bit of time on Amazon EC2 ... which was really impressive. They quoted lots of "super fast" metrics (though I'm not enough of an expert to understand any of them!), so I don't _think_ latency would be an issue.

As an aside, the Embarcadero news was extremely positive, I came away a "happy delphi-ite" ... I think that Embarcadero will do a good job of custodianship of Delphi, and have really good solid plans for it (which won't take it off in stupid new directions).

I plan to research & try out the EC2 situation a bit myself:

NOTE TO TIM: The  Embarcadero guys said that Amazon were willing to set up "clones" which software vendors like Elevate could specify ... i.e. You define a machine (with DBISAM Server on it, operating system XXX, RAM of YYY, the correct ports open etc.

Then users of DBISAM could come through you to an EC2 machine, without really knowing it was an EC2 machine ... they would think of it as "Elevate Hosted" ... and it could be designed to be the best possible DBISAM / Elevate server.

All EC2 machines have a fixed IP address ... so reaching the DBISAM server _ought_ to be very simple, assuming the machine could be set up with the right ports open etc.

We would sign up, pay a certain amount per month & be happy bunnies ... all we would need would be a fairly simple web-front-end to upload the database files ...

Sorry, forgot to mention ... the Elevate spec for the EC2 "cloneable server" could include built in back up & other useful stuff which admins like me would need.

Thanks for the info Adam. Had a look at the Amazon EC2 website and it looks
really promising. Couldn't really understand much of the tech stuff to be
honest but i'll definitely take a closer look at this. I still hope Tim
comes through with his DBISam/ ElevateDB Server hosting service. Who better
to run this service.

cheers
Gregory Sebastian

>>Couldn't really understand much of the tech stuff to be
>>honest

I am so with you on that one. The Amazon EC2 people seem to delight in the creation of unexplained TLA's which are reused in incomprehensible combinations ... I have worked through about 250 pages of "help" re-reading PR sales-speak when all I wanted was a few simple explanations, extremely tiresome & surely more complicated than it needs to be.

The process is made harder by the fact that many of the more direct simple explanations (posted by users on blogs etc.) are targeted at people building Linux servers & are therefore not useful to me as a Windows person, also much of the blogging is out of date & refers to services which have changed.

HUM.

I have got this far:

- Set up AWS account ("Amazon Web Storage").
- Set myself up with the "AWS Management Console",which is just a
  web-browser based dashboard for controlling your account.
- Run through a strange phone confirmation process to verify that I exist.
- Created 1 "compute Instance" (i.e. a semi-permanent computer in the cloud),
  It is a Win2008 Server box. This step involved choosing whether or not I wanted all
  sorts of things I didn't understand (Like "Key Tag Pairs", I just blundered through
  this stage reading the unhelpful documentation.
- Linked this Instance to an "Elastic IP" (an IP address which Amazon allocate
   to you, and you then link to your Instance.
- Run a weird "password extraction" process from the AWS Management Console
  to retrieve my Instance's log-on details for remote connection.
- Run Remote Desktop Connection on my office machine to connect to the Instance.
  (There were a few niggles here ... you need to "Always ask for Credentials", and
   the file Amazon sent me to connect with didn't work, I had to swap the computer
   name they had sent for my Elastic IP)
- And pow, I had a remote desktop visible on my computer!

... Not the most straightforward process in the world, but I do now have a working computer resource with a public-facing IP address, which is not to be sniffed at.

... also I have been unable to connect my FTP program to the Instance (something to do with ports which I don't understand!) ... so I have been manually copying files onto the Instance using "CTRL C" / "CTRL V" ... oh un-nerdly chagrin at my own lack of networking knowledge.

--

I've chosen a "small instance", which costs $0.05 per hour, and which I can turn on & off from the AWS management console whenever I want ... so the cost is cheap. I can also scale up my offering to pretty much any size of machine just by creating a new Instance with the new size & then transferring the Elastic IP. That seems clever too.

All I need now is to figure out how to make my running DBSRVR.exe on this Instance visible to applications running on other machines ...

If anyone is interested I will keep you updated!

Adam

Adam


I'm interested ..... but I went on their site and found a costing tool - I gave up.


Roy Lambert

>>I'm interested ..... but I went on their site and found a costing tool - I gave up.

Yes Roy, they seem to have taken lack of user-friendliness to a whole new level ... which is strange for a company who pioneered "one-click" purchasing.

The blizzard of buzzwords is the real problem: I challenge anyone to find an explanation for what "Amazon Elastic MapReduce" is for anywhere in the documentation.

Simple things are missing like a basic explanation of how to connect via FTP to the Amazon Server Instance once you have created it ...

I guess they feel they are targeting nerdy-tech-heads who prefer doing things the hard way. I wouldn't have bothered to fight my way through the process if I hadn't had the introduction from the Embarcadero people a few days earlier.

... its a pity because the actual offering is really very exciting, and incredibly fast & effective once you are connected & have got it working.

--

... on a different track the Embarcadero training day was great ... really reassuring to a Delphi-head like me. They seem properly committed to the product and focused around delivering a really useful offering to the customer (i.e. me).

I will definitely be continuing to develop with Delphi given what I saw, which isn't something I have been able to say with certainty for several years now. Knowing I can carry on with Delphi is a huge relief, as the idea of porting my whole code-base to Visual Studio / C# was horribly daunting.

Now I can just get on with exciting new projects that actually earn some money, rather than running around chasing my tail trying to keep up with every new idea Microsoft want to sell to me!

Adam

>Yes Roy, they seem to have taken lack of user-friendliness to a whole new level

<vbg>

>.. its a pity because the actual offering is really very exciting, and incredibly fast & effective once you are connected & have got it working.

I await Adam's guide to setting it up.

>I will definitely be continuing to develop with Delphi given what I saw, which isn't something I have been able to say with certainty for several years now. Knowing I can carry on with Delphi is a huge relief, as the idea of porting my whole code-base to Visual Studio / C# was horribly daunting.

Ditto but I'm stuck in a time warp of D2006.

Roy Lambert [Team Elevate]