NYCPHP Meetup

[Jon Baer]

All the cool kids are running Amazon EC2 Xen-based servers if you  
want to just give it a try :-)

I don't think you lose much performance when you "slice" it right  
(another science altogether).  I think there is a misconception that  
one can take > 8+ app/db/web servers and stack them on one box and  
have them run like they would expect if it was dedicated.

A good example of virtualized power is the MyEC2Manager written in PHP.
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/servlet/KbServlet/ 
downloadImage/442-102-14/ec2-manager.gif

When PHP apps themselves are written w/ virtualization in mind is  
when it will get very interesting.  Imagine something like:

function job($queue) {
   // can I handle all of it?  If not fire up another x instances to  
help me out //
}

On top of all that there is an identical Firefox extension I use for  
EC2 instances ...
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?entryID=609

Good stuff :-)

- Jon

On Apr 8, 2007, at 9:02 PM, Rob Marscher wrote:

> Is anyone here using virtual servers?  It seems to have some nice  
> benefits in terms of being able to easily move them between  
> physical boxes and scale them up to more ram/cpu.  However, I've  
> heard that you lose some performance and am trying to figure out  
> when it's worth it.  I'm talking about virtual server's at the  
> kernel level... like Xen.