We switched over to Amazon EC2 at the beginning of the week and so far things have gone very smoothly. The Extra Large Instances are performing well and we are benefiting from the extra RAM.
The only glitch was related to sending email. Our system used sendmail to send out email, and on our previous host this was no problem. Reverse DNS was set up correctly so that when mail servers received our emails they could look up our originating server from the IP address and confirm the email was not spam.
However, Amazon EC2 does not support reverse DNS lookups on its servers, so shortly after our system sent out its first batch of emails, we received a notice from Amazon saying that some servers had reported us as sending spam and that we had to contact Amazon within 24 hours or have our servers terminated.
The solution has been to move our SMTP server to an off-Amazon server that also hosts our SVN repository and other miscellaneous items. So now our Amazon servers send email via our off-site server and things seem to be working fine.
We have a few remaining tasks left for next week - setting up automatic incremental backups using ESB snapshots and some automated monitoring processes.
Hi Graham,
Did you go through a company like RightScale or did you build/configure/monitor your own environment on EC2?
Posted by: Mohammad Abed | Nov 14, 2009 at 08:30 PM