I read all over the Amazon documentations, but I'm still confused or should I say overwhelmed by the different terms.
I'm coming from a traditional web hosting environment where the only concept I understand is how much storage I have and how much bandwidth I'm allowed.
Here are what I understand so far about amazon and my questions about a lot of it.
EC2 - I assume are instances where I can set up my webserver (IIS) and run my .NET application? Or is it already setup for me?
EBS - For database? If not, where do I get the database server? Is the database server (Sql server 2005 or 2008) already installed? What is Snapshot Get Requests? and Snapshot Put Request?
S3 - What is this used for? I thought EBS is for storage, confused here. Why you need S3?
Elastic Load Balancing - I thought load balancing is just a way to alleviate the burdens on your web servers. how does it work with Amazon? What do they mean by "elastic" load balancing?
Data Transfer between region - What does that mean? and how do you control which region the data transfers to and from?
My requirements are the following
- I need an IIS webserver to run my page
- I need a database server
- I need a location to store my files (can it be on the same "server" as #1)?
- I need the database and file servers to always be recoverable. (I heard we need to store it into EBS to avoid loss of data?)
- In case one web server is overloaded, performs slow, I need it to switch off to another server in the farm.
- If traffic spikes, then I need a way to increase CPU, memory, etc. The ability to handle traffic nicely (which is the purpose of elastic I'm assuming)
In addition, I don't really understand the concept of "if you are not running your instance, shut it down or else it will