Amazon Web Services + ASP.NET MVC 3 + MySql [closed]

Question

I have an application built on ASP.NET MVC 3 that uses Entity Framework to connect to MySql for its data store. I am looking at hosting options, and Amazon looks like a very tempting place for me to host as the userbase will be shifting between both extremes (massive audience and no audience).

1) Is this possible?

2) Is it a bad idea?

3) If it is possible, what do I need from AWS to make it work?

Any help would be extremely helpful, I'm looking at setting the host up this week.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The issue with AWS is that administration and configuration of the server is on you, you will have to configure the server and IIS, I would suggest you to use appharbor instead, it's a PaaS hosting that uses Git for deployments and it's extremely pleasant to use, it's been in beta for almost a year and I find it very reliable, I have a production app on it without issues. Its infrastructure runs under AWS and you get to scale when you have to by adding more web servers on the control panel, and you dont have to configure the server yourself.

Answer 2

I would like to second the appharbor vote with the following two cents of advice...

I first tried to use MySql with appharbor using their MySql integrated service, but I found that it was difficult to use with multiple apps on the same database. I like to keep the admin app separate from the user app and I found that couldn't be done using appharbor best practices. I instead opted to use Amazon RDS directly from my appharbor app. You need to make sure they are in the same availability zones for performance, but this is working well for me.

I also keep an Amazon EC2 instance for worker processes that I run directly with the Task Scheduler on Windows b/c appharbor doesn't have support for worker processes yet.

This setup is working well for us...

My other gripe was some down time they had this past weekend... but this is bound to happen with any service, and they got it back up very quickly. They also now have integrated add-on StillAlive which I haven't used yet but am excited about.

EDIT MAY 2012 : AH now has options for background workers, check this blog post http://blog.appharbor.com/2012/4/18/scheduled-tasks-using-quartz-and-appharbor-background-workers