For example if you concern is persistence of your data the solution is simple: keep the database server in a physical hardware that you control and extrapolate the Front-end / back-end logic of your application to a virtual machine (AMI in EC2) that you can instantiate / unload on demand.

If you experience latency issues in your EC2/DB connections, put a MemcacheD server in EC2 and cache as many (read) queries as you possibly can.

This gives you the flexibility of using (and paying for) only the resources that you need with a granularity of “hours”, instead of paying full rate for multiple servers even when your traffic is low (i.e. at 2:00am in the morning).

You will also save in the overhead of maintaining all those servers yourself, installing software, doing updates, managing repositories, etc. In EC2 all you have is an image that instantiate multiple times (as many as you need depending on your traffic at any given time).

And finally you will escape hardware issues, you don’t have to worry about defective hardware and downtime for preventive maintenance, Amazon does that for you

I think the advantages clearly overweight the con’s

Also, note that data is *not* lost on reboot. I reboot my instances all the time, and all the data added to the image since it was loaded is still there when it fires back up.

As for my potential use, I’m not worried about the latency because it wouldn’t be while the user is waiting for a response. The use case isn’t upload an image, process and show me the results. It more of an archiving process where they would batch upload hundreds of files for storage.

I think your idea of using EC2 to process images is interesting but I would do some serious testing with regards to network latency if you have to transfer the image up to EC2 and then resize it, all while the end user is waiting…

One company however is really singing the praise for Amazon’s S3 product, SmugMug. Their CEO has a blog and talks about how much they are saving in hardware costs using Amazon’s storage; several hundred thousand in under a year no less.

One idea that I’m working on will use a combination of a VPS solution and EC2. It would utilize EC2 servers for image processing thus saving the main server for the web application. In this scenario I don’t need it to be persistent, just up long enough to process the images, and since you can start and stop instances programmatically, it can scale as needed and I won’t have to have the servers running 24/7, which is great since they charge by the hour and not by month.