AWS Cloudfront with Webserver, RDS and Wowza Media Server

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8388699

  •  28-10-2019
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Question

I am setting up a website that uses Amazon EC2 as Webserver, EBS to store the data of the website and another instance of Wowza for Video on Demand streaming and it seems hard to find answers for my questions:

  1. If my webserver instance is terminated, am I loosing the apache settings/modules on my ec2 instance as well?

  2. Can I have mysql on my webserver instance to save cost of RDS or is it a bad idea?

  3. If I am using RDS for the database, is it deployed on edge locations also (like what cloudfront is doing)?

  4. If have a Wowza Media server instance also running on ec2, can Wowza make use of Cloudfront as well, just so if somebody from somewhere in the world will get a VOD stream right from the next edge location?

Thanks!

Was it helpful?

Solution

  1. If your instance is terminated, the instance and the EBS storage associated with that instance is lost. If you want to remove an instance without losing the state of that server, create an image (AMI) of the server before terminating it.

  2. Depends on how much IT admin you want. The whole idea of Amazon is it takes this admin away from you for a cost higher than if you do it yourself. They do the backing up of databases and load balancing for you (that's the trickier part). That said, Amazon isn't fail-proof, you have to do backups outside of the Amazon system for everything, I've had instances crash and trash the disk, it does happen.

  3. Their database instances are deployed in their main data center locations, which is different to their cloud distribution locations. Having the servers and databases in the same zone will save you network costs.

  4. To use cloudfront you first create one (obviously) and then use the cloudfront domain instead of your own, the cloudfront cache maps through to your domain and caches at the edge location. If it the content is accessible from the server, it's possible to put a cloudfront in front of it. Note that cloudfront charges you not only slightly more than for traffic directly from your server, it also charges to get traffic from your server to the edge locations as instance traffic cost and you'll be charged per 10,000 requests aside from bandwidth (larger content works out cheaper per MB).

It's also possible to map your domain to the cloudfront URL if you want a pretty looking domain.

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