Anyone using Amazon EC2 + SQL Azure?

Question

Anyone running any .NET web apps on Amazon EC2 but using SQL Azure for their RDBMS?

I can't see why this wouldn't work but I was wondering if anyone has any experiences good or bad.

Answer 1

I do this for several clients. It works quite well. If Amazon had SQL Server rather than Oracle or MySQL I'd be using that, but my apps are all T-SQL.

In either case, the time between Microsoft and Amazon is practically nill. Remember, if you are programming correctly, their is very little back-and-forth. Cost wise, you can get a nice fast Azure database for $50/month that will never break. You get an amazon EC2 server for about $50/month. You get an S3 bucket for your static files and a cloud-front link to join them with your site - cost $5/month.

Bam. If you want to scale up, just copy that EC2 instance and use their load balancer. Boom. No down time. No screwing around with databases. It just goes.

Oh yeah... if your client wants the site, they can just pop it on their own machine wherever they want, change the DNS and you can sign the Azure DB over to them. No downtime.

Anyway, Amazon rocks. Azure is pretty nice. For financial reasons, I actually use Azure for all my DB, cloudfront for all static files, and colocated servers at Hurricane Electric for my own webservers. If they go down (as they actually did today for 20 mins), it automatically fails-over to an EC2 machine which can still reach the data at Azure, so nobody really notices.

Answer 2

We are actually doing the opposite of this. Our SQL Server is in EC2 but web server on Azure. I know it sounds odd, but we did it because we already had servers in EC2 but we get a certain amount of free Azure hours per month with BizSpark.

Anyway, it is working very well. We just had to open the firewall in EC2 to allow the Azure IP address through. We havnt noticed any performance issues.