Role of AMIs and EBS in designing Fault Tolerant Systems
What is Fault Tolerance? Simply put it is the ability of the system to be in operational or be available even if at least one or more of its constituent systems fail. So what happens if a system is not fault tolerant. Well, the price of being down depends on the business. In some cases it may cost few millions for few minutes of downtime. How AWS can help prevent or reduce Downtime? AWS has tools and techniques to build fault tolerant systems which can be automatic or requires minimum human intervention. There are many such tools in AWS but in this article let us look at the role of AMI and EBS. What is AMI? AMI is Amazon Machine Image which is basically a prebuilt software configuration which can be applied to EC2 instance. It can include Operating system, Application servers and application apart from security patches. As an enterprise it is important for you to create your own library of AMIs which can then be used to instantiate EC2 ins...