So in about 6 days all direct addressed EC2 instances will be shutdown. This day comes with *PLENTY* of warning, so decommissioning the 3 direct addressed EC2 instances that we still have running has been planned for a while. Of course, why do something now if you can just as easily put it off until later? ;-)

Okay, so maybe that’s not the best philosophy in life, but when you’ve designed your server infrastructure around worst case scenario disaster recovery, the thought of “losing” an instance or three doesn’t present the type of anxiety you would normally expect, so in the case of EC2, it actually works pretty well.

That said, as per the following screen scrape *even if* we didn’t design our system with a worst case scenario mentality, we’d probably still be okay,

[mdavid@domU-12-31-34-00-02-46 ~]$ top

top - 15:25:11 up 351 days, 14:09,  1 user,  load average: 0.03, 0.16, 0.15
Tasks:  67 total,   1 running,  66 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  1.8% us,  0.1% sy,  0.0% ni, 98.1% id,  0.1% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:   1740944k total,   300896k used,  1440048k free,    20964k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,    31328k cached

em. mine.

Anyway, in case any of you were wondering just how stable EC2 is the above should give you a fairly good feel. Of course, I would still recommend using a worst case scenario disaster-based architecture regardless of how stable EC2 might be. But that’s not out of fear of potential disaster looming on the horizon and instead based on the peace-of-mind that is gained from the “oh well, just launch another instance” mentality that has now become commonplace around these parts.

It’s a good feeling, I assure you. :D

Thanks for the peace-of-mind, Amazon!