Load balancing with HTTPS
We have apache/java/php web application that has HTTPS sessions and we want to move to Amazon EC2 with Elastic Load balancer. But we've been reading on stackoverflow that various features of HTTPS are not supported by EC2.
Storage performance
We also have database server (Postgres) that is hosted on RAID 10 array. We tried to host the database on virtual instance with iSCSI-based file system with our provider, Softlayer. But it was horribly slow. Literally like reading files over slow remote network share. We reported issue to Softlayer multiple times and they tweaked iSCSI connection, increased it to maximum speed possible (1 Gigabit) but still this kind performance was too slow for regular file system, not even talking database.
I don't know if that's particular incompetence on Softlayer's behalf or in general virtual instances are only useful for low disk access scenarios like web servers but not detabases or any file-heavy scenarios? Softlayer is one of the top provides and if their iSCSI hardware is not up to requirements, can Amazon be better? Maybe Amazon uses something better than iSCSI?
Anyone hosted with Amazon/EC3 something similar to our setup?
There's no way of knowing if this will work until you port your infrastructure to EC2. With these two issues, HTTPS and disk access speed you cannot predict until you hit it with real-world users.
You can get a really good estimate of how things will work by doing some benchmarking of your own on AWS.
SoftLayer is notorious for having unstable iSCSI storage performance, at least to those that have tried using their service. Unless you have a huge dataset, local disks will outperform attached solutions on SL, as you won't be sharing any spindles with anyone else.
Here's a good article from 2009 regarding EBS I/O performance: http://orion.heroku.com/past/2009/7/29/io_performance_on_ebs/