Question

I have thought a lot recently about the different hosting types that are available out there. We can get pretty decent latency (average) from an EC2 instance in Europe (we’re situated in Sweden) and the cost is pretty good. Obviously, the possibility of scaling up and down instances is amazing for us that’s in a really expansive phase right now.

From a logical perspective, I also believe that Amazon probably can provide better availability and stability than most hosting companies on the market. Probably it will also outweigh the need of having a phone number to dial when we wonder anything and force us to google the things by ourselves 🙂

So, what should we be concerned about if we were about to run our web server on EC2? What are the pro’s and cons?

To clarify, we will run a pretty standard LAMP configuration with memcached added probably.

Thanks

Answer 1

So, what should we be concerned about if we were about to run our web server on EC2? What are the pro’s and cons?

The pros and cons of EC2 are somewhat dependent on your business. Below is a list of issues that I believe affect large organizations:

• Separation of duties Your existing company probably has separate networking and server operations teams. With EC2 it may be difficult to separate these concerns. ie. The guy defining your Security Groups (firewall) is probably the same person who can spin up servers.
• Home access to your servers Corporate environments are usually administered on-premise or through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) with two-factor authentication. Administrators with access to your EC2 control panel can likely make changes to your environment from home. Note further that your EC2 access keys/accounts may remain available to people who leave or get fired from your company, making home access an even bigger problem…
• Difficulty in validating security Some security controls may inadvertently become weak. Within your premises you can be 99% certain that all servers are behind a firewall that restricts any admin access from outside your premises. When you’re in the cloud it’s a lot more difficult to ensure such controls are in place for all your systems.
• Appliances and specialized tools do not go in the cloud Specialized tools cannot go into the cloud. This may impact your security posture. For example, you may have some sort of network intrusion detection appliances sitting in front of on-premise servers, and you will not be able to move these into the cloud.
• Legislation and Regulations I am not sure about regulations in your country, but you should be aware of cross-border issues. For example, running European systems on American EC2 soil may open your up to Patriot Act regulations. If you’re dealing with credit card numbers or personally identifiable information then you may also have various issues to deal with if infrastructure is outside of your organization.
• Organizational processes Who has access to EC2 and what can they do? Can someone spin up an Extra Large machine and install their own software? (Side note: Our company http://LabSlice.com actually adds policies to stop this from happening). How do you backup and restore data? Will you start replicating processes within your company simply because you’ve got a separate cloud infrastructure?
• Auditing challenges Any auditing activities that you normally undertake may be complicated if data is in the cloud. A good example is PCI — Can you actually always prove data is within your control if it’s hosted outside of your environment somewhere in the ether?
• Public/private connectivity is a challenge Do you ever need to mix data between your public and private environments? It can become a challenge to send data between these two environments, and to do so securely.
• Monitoring and logging You will likely have central systems monitoring your internal environment and collecting logs from your servers. Will you be able to achieve the monitoring and log collection activities if you run servers off-premise?
• Penetration testing Some companies run periodic penetration testing activities directly on public infrastructure. I may be mistaken, but I think that running pen testing against Amazon infrastructure is against their contract (which make sense, as they would only see public hacking activity against infrastructure they own).

I believe that EC2 is definitely a good idea for small/medium businesses. They are rarely encumbered by the above issues, and usually Amazon can offer better services than an SMB could achieve themselves. For large organizations EC2 can obviously raise some concerns and issues that are not easily dealt with.

Simon @ http://blog.LabSlice.com