We have just started to move our infrastructure to Amazon's AWS (EU West). Since we started the move we have started seeing some quite substantial spikes in network latency. Our setup is quite simple, we are running two/three web servers (large instances) behind a ELB and a RDS (XL instance) instance to server the web servers.
Our response time now ranges from abysmal to OK, today's values: 427 ms [London, UK] - 1,642 ms[London, UK] (values from Pingdom). With our previous provider (same setup, traditional managed hosting) we were used to seeing around 200 - 300 ms. Is there anything we can do to improve the response time or is this something that we have no control over.
I read about the problems Amazon seemed to have in Jan 2010 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/15/amazon_ec2_latency/) however haven't heard anything since thus assumed it was a brief period where this happened.
What do you guys think, is there something I can do or is it the penalty you have to use for Amazon's flexibility?
Thanks for your help.
one solution can be that try to make testing server in all of the four zones, that you have available with you. and check that which zone's server has the least latency, then migrate all of your instance to that zone. (and remember to keep all of your server in one zone, to minimize latency among the servers.)