> people talk about utilizing multiple availability zones in EC2 as some sort of burden
My use case isn't for an ongoing server where you require availability. It's purely about compute power - I don't care where the compute power comes from but preferably I want low latency to my customer. So ideally I would just get all instances for any given customer from a single region.
I did find in the end that, as you say, I would sometimes not be able to get an instance in a region even when I was below my 20 limit for reasons internal to Amazon, so the failover work was going to be something I had to deal with anyhow ... but it just added complexity to my life earlier than it would have otherwise.
Edit: I would also mention that I certainly don't think of it as a "bad" experience. I think it is something of a small miracle that Amazon offers the service they do in the first place and I certainly understand why they have caution about handing out large limits to just anyone. I only made my comment above as a kind of caution to not just assume you're going to get a raised limit from Amazon immediately and especially don't leave talking to Amazon about it until the last minute if you're planning to launch something.
Thanks, that's an angle I haven't seen since I've mostly used EC2 as a hosting service. What little batch work I've done on it hasn't involved instance counts where I ran into limits. (Now, EBS i/o limits and other things... :/ )
My use case isn't for an ongoing server where you require availability. It's purely about compute power - I don't care where the compute power comes from but preferably I want low latency to my customer. So ideally I would just get all instances for any given customer from a single region.
I did find in the end that, as you say, I would sometimes not be able to get an instance in a region even when I was below my 20 limit for reasons internal to Amazon, so the failover work was going to be something I had to deal with anyhow ... but it just added complexity to my life earlier than it would have otherwise.
Edit: I would also mention that I certainly don't think of it as a "bad" experience. I think it is something of a small miracle that Amazon offers the service they do in the first place and I certainly understand why they have caution about handing out large limits to just anyone. I only made my comment above as a kind of caution to not just assume you're going to get a raised limit from Amazon immediately and especially don't leave talking to Amazon about it until the last minute if you're planning to launch something.