Moving The Database Cloud Computing

Moving your database to EC2 is probably the hardest part of the move to AWS. If you plan on keeping your database (as opposed to migrating to a cloud solution like SimpleDB), which is what I would recommend for maintaining vendor independence, you should use EBS (Elastic Block Storage) so that your storage persists independently from the life of your EC2 instance. RDS.

• Amazon EBS allows you to create storage volumes from 1 GB to 1 TB that can be mounted as devices by Amazon EC2 instances. Multiple volumes can be mounted to the same instance.
• Storage volumes behave like raw, unformatted block devices, with user-supplied device names and a block device interface. You can create a file system on top of Amazon EBS volumes or use them in any other way you would use a block device (like a hard drive).
• Amazon EBS volumes are placed in a specific Availability Zone and can then be attached to instances also in that same Availability Zone
• Each storage volume is automatically replicated within the same Availability Zone. This prevents data loss due to failure of any single hardware component.
• Amazon EBS also provides the ability to create point-in-time snapshots of volumes, which are persisted to Amazon S3. These snapshots can be used as the starting point for new Amazon EBS volumes and protect data for long-term durability. The same snapshot can be used to instantiate as many volumes as you wish.
• CloudFront lets you keep multiple copies in different zones.