AWS instance choice for cassandra

Question

Datastax recommends m3 instance for productions clusters. link And for the right reasons, it also mentions that EBS is not recommended . However, m3 instances do not have that much of instance storage available. m3.large - 32 GB , m3.xlarge - 80 GB

Without EBS one cannot scale. Is the recommendation keeping these storage levels in mind - m3.xlarge wiht 80gb for moderate production (with replications) or is there more to it?

Should we just consider m1 instances as they seem more cost efficient for the storage at least?

Thanks.

Answer 1

In my experience, you are better off with the m1/m2 spinning disks than you are with EBS or other shared network storage. Yes, SSD's in the m3 instances are nice, but they are tiny. If it does not make sense financially to scale out--or to bump up to i2's--your best bet in AWS is probably the old m1/m2 series.