A while back I wrote a blog on how to use Delphix in AWS cloud. It was sort of a thought experiment, because the performance of EBS was too slow for serious database usage. However, with the release of Amazon's latest high performance EC2 SSD instance, things changed. Netflix had done their Cassandra benchmark with the new instance. They were able to use this instance to replace the m2.4xlarge instance with cache and cut about 60% of cost.
To me, the fast I/O EC2 instance now makes AWS very attractive to be used for data intensive analytics project. It also means you can really run databases in the cloud without relying on heavy (sometimes custom) caching*. I can hardly wait to see if I can use it in my future project.
*See the very interesting five-minute rule on how SSD improves the disk performance.
