Surviving AWS Failures with a Node.js and MongoDB Stack

Here's how I do it:<p><pre><code> $ pip install dotcloud $ echo 'frontend: {"type": "nodejs"}' &#62;&#62; dotcloud.yml $ echo 'db: {"type": "mongodb"}' &#62;&#62; dotcloud.yml $ dotcloud push $MYAPP $ dotloud scale $MYAPP frontend=3 db=3 </code></pre> This will deploy my nodejs app across 3 AZs and setup load-balancing to them, deploy a Mongo replicaset across 3 AZs, setup authentication, and inject connection strings into the app's environment. It's also way cheaper than AWS.<p>The only difference with OP's setup is that the Mongo ports are publicly accessible. This means authentication is the only thing standing between you and an attacker (and maybe the need to find your particular tcp port among a couple million others in dotCloud's pool).<p>(disclaimer, I work at dotCloud)

Considering how often EC2 outages are EBS related, we've moved all our servers off of EBS to ephemeral drives. I'm surprised there aren't more people advocating this route.

Reddit refuses to move away from their current infrastructure, despite being held together with little more than string and silly-putty.<p>According to a dev, they haven't even <i>talked</i> about it. Simply hasn't ever come up.<p>So Reddit's gonna keep going down like this. Don't be like Reddit.

You need to be in multiple regions to tolerate EC2 outages, not just multiple AZs. Even then, this is only good until AWS's first multi-region failure; this doesn't seem to be an impossible event given EC2's recent track record. Though I can well understand that designing for EC2 region failure is not worth the cost for most systems.