How stable are ec2 machines? [closed]

Question

In Amazon ec2, how frequently will an instance of a running machine crash? Has anyone experienced this?

Answer 1

We run our company infrastructure (corporate Web site, JIRA, Confluence and Subversion) on EC2; we've had no outages on any of the machines for about 6 months. Since EC2 came out of Beta last October, they have a proper SLA in place.

You can do a few things to mitigate ec2 outages:

• Create a machine image (AMI) of your exact configuration so that you can bring up a new instance right away in case of failure (and make sure you can instantiate your new AMI successfully before you need it !)
• Store critical data on Elastic Block Store volumes; these persist even if the EC2 instance goes down, and are more reliable than physical hard drives since their data is replicated.

Answer 2

I have used EC2 for about 6 months now. Last year they crashed from time to time (I have 4 running and one crashed on average once a month or so). In the last 3 months we have had no crashes at all. I would say Amazon has really beefed up there infrastructure as EC2 is now out of beta.

Bruce

Answer 3

I have run about 10 instances for a few days, and they ran fine, no crashs. They run very stably.

Answer 4

I've had a Windows Server 2003 instance running for about 3 months now with out any crashes.

Answer 5

I have had an Ubuntu 8.04 instance up for nearly a year (354 days today) with zero fuss. I use it as a test server for my web development projects. It has only disappeared once, and all I had to do was reboot it.