Taking The Jump (Leap!) to AWS: Performance, Costings and other things

I appreciate that most companies now exist within the AWS or Azure clouds, and will be a whizz at scripting, loading balancing and billing. But for me, it’s a big move to take a server that I have run for five years, and which has run — mostly — well, and move to AWS.

While performance is a worry, especially as I have 16GB of server memory on my current server, and six cores, it is cost that it the major worry, especially as I have to pay for it myself. But it has supported my teaching for many years, and has been a platform for me to learn new methods. So, with my baremetal server now down to a secondary plexar boot, and a console login required to reboot my server, it needed to migrate to the public cloud. Also, my 1&1 server has a small 60GB disk for c:, but 1TB for d:. As it’s Windows, unfortunately, much of the software goes onto c: by default, so I just could do anything properly with it. I ended up creating soft links all over the place. I also wanted Visual Studio on it, but there’s no way it could fit on there, even with the 1TB disk. So, as the semester has now finished, I’m taking the jump (leap, in fact).

We build a whole virtualised infrastructure using ESXi, and it works well. Currently we support thousands of students, and with complex networked infrastrutures. And for my teaching…