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.