Cloud Computing

Me again
Just wondering what you guys are thinking about "cloud computing."

Do you think the PBBG scene might be able to profit from this idea?
Do you think this could help developers to "code without limitations"?

Weewar has been running on Amazon's EC2 for some time now and we are very happy with their offering. Adding and removing power is super easy and being billed by the hour does make a huge difference if you do a quick test on 5 servers every once in a while :)

I've never really tested the cloud computing thing, but it definitely sound like a perfect match for any MMOG especially if you are still in some kind of startup phase. In my oppinion most of the mid sized games are focused on a certain region and this automatically means that you will experience heavy load fluctuations over the day because most people sleep at night and so on :)

But nonetheless, you have to be careful if it's worthwile to switch from a dedicated server onto a cloud like Amazon's EC2. Especially for small games which are served by just one dedicated server it's likely, that switching to a cloud will raise your expenses in the beginning! If you plan to grow it might be a cool move but it should be considered carefully even if services like mosso.com etc are making it really easy to host on a cloud.

I have a question to those of you who have already moved over to EC2 or any other cloud: Do you have a single, dedicated server left? Or do you have moved anything to the cloud? And what is with the DB server? At least in EC2 when it crashes, it comes up freshly from it's image, all data that's not backuped is lost, how do you prevent such risks?

Thanks a lot,

Thorben

A friend of mine has been using GoogleCode servers for a try, which, as far as I know, are similar to Amazon's clouds. But the bandwith and the connection is not good enough and we had ping rates of approx. 160 ms which is by far too slow for an online game ;)

Let's wait for what Alex has to say, he seems to have a lot more experience...

We have moved everything over and are now running on several instances. We do back up all our data every so often to amazon own S3 which is persistent. We have not expierenced any downtimes or unscheduled reboots with them so far. At least non due to their fault :)

Right now it pans out more expensive than necessary but we will get massive benefits as Weewar grows.

Just found a nice article about Amazons Cloud Computing recently published at IBM :

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ar-cloudaws1/index.html?S_TACT=105AGX04&S_CMP=EDU

So long...

Mr.Maxx

Thanks for sharing with us! Really nice article!