but one instance on Amazon is not high availability.
The rest of your post could be read as apples with oranges, Charm was expensive because they made massive architectural mistakes. End of story.
This is not to say that what you are doing/saying is incorrect. Your stuff works and is able to cope with the load thrown at it on one server.
To be honest I'm quite mystified why startups boast about using n instances to serve a few thousand hits. Node, some python frameworks and ruby are ridiculously wasteful[1]. All it tells me is that you've not though about the best way to do things, you've just used the latest tools and smooshed them together. If you had to have more than one server to handle 2[2] tickets a minute and 1 hit a second on your website I'd be questioning your programming skill
The one thing I do take issue with is your implied claim of high availability. Hourly backups, and no hot spare or active active replication is not high availability. Yes you can rebuild an instance in 5 minutes, but only in best case, and you've still lost up to an hour's worth of user data (around 60 tickets). That is a commendable recovery rate, but its still downtime.
[1] depending on usage, of course.
[2] using stats from the article
The rest of your post could be read as apples with oranges, Charm was expensive because they made massive architectural mistakes. End of story.
This is not to say that what you are doing/saying is incorrect. Your stuff works and is able to cope with the load thrown at it on one server.
To be honest I'm quite mystified why startups boast about using n instances to serve a few thousand hits. Node, some python frameworks and ruby are ridiculously wasteful[1]. All it tells me is that you've not though about the best way to do things, you've just used the latest tools and smooshed them together. If you had to have more than one server to handle 2[2] tickets a minute and 1 hit a second on your website I'd be questioning your programming skill
The one thing I do take issue with is your implied claim of high availability. Hourly backups, and no hot spare or active active replication is not high availability. Yes you can rebuild an instance in 5 minutes, but only in best case, and you've still lost up to an hour's worth of user data (around 60 tickets). That is a commendable recovery rate, but its still downtime.
[1] depending on usage, of course. [2] using stats from the article