Today the Datanauts peer inside AWS. Amazon has created a powerful suite of cloud services and built a online empire by renting compute, storage, and other services to enterprises and startups alike.

But just because everything lives in the cloud doesn’t mean practical design considerations go away. If you’re considering AWS, the Datanauts and guest Alex Galbraith examine the pros and cons of storage, networking, and scaling so you can get the best design for the least amount of money within the capabilities that Amazon provides.

Alex is a solutions architect for a global service provider. He also blogs at Tekhead.it. It was a series of blogs by Alex that spurred this conversation.

They discuss issues such as  IOPS limits in EBS, write and read limitations in S3, how Amazon Direct Connect and VPCs work, and how to make the most of auto-scaling groups.

*Please note that during the storage discussion, Alex mentioned that you had to dismount the  volume when resizing elastic block storage volumes. But after this podcast was recorded, Amazon announced that this isn’t the case anymore.

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Show Links:

AWS Tips And Gotchas Series – Alex Galbraith

Elastic Block Store (EBS) – Amazon

Elastic File System (EFS) – Amazon

Amazon EC2 Instances – Amazon

EC2 Spot Instance Termination Notices – Amazon

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) – Amazon

Placement Groups – Amazon

Request Rate and Performance Considerations – Amazon