Tagged: ebs

Adding Swap to an EC2 Micro Instance

EC2 micro instances come with no swap by default – at least every micro instance that I’ve ever launched does, I’m not sure if it’s theoretically possible to launch an instance with swap. The lack of swap is probably a side-effect of the limited memory combined with EBS-only storage and concomitant risk of high EBS charges if you swap heavily.

However, if you’re willing to accept the risk of unexpected high EBS I/O costs, it’s straightforward to add swap:

# /bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024
# /sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1
# /sbin/swapon /var/swap.1

Or, if you prefer Puppet:

class swapfile {

  exec { "create swap file":
    command => "/bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024",
    creates => "/var/swap.1",
  }

  exec { "attach swap file":
    command => "/sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1 && /sbin/swapon /var/swap.1",
    require => Exec["create swap file"],
    unless => "/sbin/swapon -s | grep /var/swap.1",
  }
  
}
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Amazon Elastic Block Store is out!

Amazon’s much-awaited Elastic Block Store for EC2 is out this morning; I’m excited to give this a try. A couple downers from the announcement: The pricing is somewhat high – $0.10 per allocated GB per month plus $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests – and the reliability isn’t where I’d like it to be. Specifically, Amazon notes:

Volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of around 4%, making EBS volumes 10 times more reliable than typical commodity disk drives.

Because Amazon EBS servers are replicated within a single Availability Zone, mirroring data across multiple Amazon EBS volumes in the same Availability Zone will not significantly improve volume durability.

That last sentence makes it sound like there is a 0.1% – 0.5% chance of catastrophic data loss of many distinct EBS volumes in an availability zone. If that’s the case, that’s scary – off the top of my head, I’d say your run-of-the mill “Enterprise” SAN doesn’t have a one-in-two hundred risk of catastrophic failure per year.

More links, not all of which I’ve had a chance to fully digest yet: