Could someone who knows better comment on the feasibility of this? It sounds like a really good idea, but I'd imagine it's a bit more difficult than it sounds.
Sure, I'll comment on the feasibility of this: it's a ridiculous idea.
One of the features that allows AWS to scale is that it runs on a unified and consistant hardware platform. Take a look at the recent Google Data Center video or the Facebook Open Server initiative - companies try where possible to run identical hardware for all of their needs as it removes inconsistances in behavior and performance between arbitrarily different pieces of equipment.
So the idea of giving Amazon your own hardware to host is terrible.
The other part of his idea sounds like mirroring servers so that if an EC2 instance goes down, some bare-metal hardware running elsewhere could kick in. That's totally feasible, but no need to do it in the same DC under Amazon's control. Just set up your own machines (bare-metal or virtual) and keep them in sync with your EC2 instance. In the event of EC2 going down you can just change your DNS over to point your fall-back IP or do some clever off-site IP load-balancing tricks (assuming the load balancer hasn't gone down too)
In fact this would have been a good strategy for the ECG monitoring folks if they needed to keep service up even during a prolonged EC2 outage.
Haha yea, the 'idea' was kind of a mix between totally crazy and realizable. Mostly just fun to speculate about (and bemusedly wonder if Amazon might be investigating)
