Jaan Paljasma | Tech Blog

Route 53 Health Checks Website availability is utmost important if your business depends on it. There are lots of free services (and paid services, too) to constantly monitor your site's availability and send you an email if website is not available. Some of these services offer periodic checks for every 15 minutes, some in 5, and only few support checking your site's health every 60 seconds or less. While this sounds good, what can you do about when your site actually is down? Imagine scenario like this: it's 8pm Friday, nobody is in the office, tech support does not pick up the phone. And your website is down, totally. Yes, you received alert, even multiple alerts. Even some clients call, and your competitors rub hands. Here's what you can do: enable Route53 health checks and host backup site in Amazon S3 (the backup site can simply say that "Sorry, we are currently experiencing technical issues; please check back later." - it is 100 times better than...

Amazon Web Services announced this long-time waited update to its OpsWorks by adding support to Elastic Load Balancer . During AWS Summit 2013 New York it was mentioned several times that ELB support will be added soon  - I am glad they kept their word. Until now, developers taking advantage of Amazon OpsWorks were forced to bring up one instance as HAProxy; but you can now add Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to your OpsWorks application stacks and get all the built-in capabilities ELB is known for, including automatic scaling across availability zones. Combining this feature with Amazon Route53 latency based routing , and you have highly available, redundant, scalable application. Related article: AWS OpsWorks supports t1.micro instances