Questions[amazon-elastic-ip](server)

I am a solo developer and the sites I'm deploying are very small, usually hobby sites and I have a few questions about the Amazon services.

1. Is there a reason for me to use beanstalk or should I just stick with a single ec2 instance?

2. Should I use RDS for database? I heard someone say that I could just install a database on my ec2 instance, making it cheaper. I'm trying to keep everything as cheap as possible.

3. I need to point custom domains to my sites. Pretty sure that means I have to deal with elastic IPs. Do those work with beanstalk or only with individual ec2 instances?

Thanks in advance!

I can give a single instance an Elastic IP. No problem.

But I have an Elastic Beanstalk app. It can create and remove instances as needed. It has a load balancer. How can I get these features (Elastic IP and Elastic Beanstalk) to work together?

Ultimately, all I want to do is make calls to my server through my domain like this: mydomain.com/someApiCall and I don't want to worry about my Elastic IP becoming "detached."

Is it possible to assign an Elastic IP to a Load Balancer?

Of the folks managing their own clusters (i.e. not using/paying for Amazon Autoscale, Rightscale, Scalr, etc.), how are you managing your instances on EC2 and handling (e.g.) failover? I'm wondering if most folks just end up writing their own boatloads of scripts against the EC2 API, as I suspect.

That's certainly our approach: whip up our own Python Boto-based monitoring/restarting daemon that runs off-site, listening for UDP keep-alives from our instances. On failure, we snapshot volumes, register images, start new instances, delete old volumes, and so on.

Every so often, when hacking on our scripts, I think there must be some open-source tools out there that deal with these issues already, and which don't have the constraints of (say) Scalr, but I always come back from Google empty-handed. (Things like Scalr have are pretty limited in the supported set/versions/configurations of software, and have specialized and IMO cumbersome ways of manipulating these setups.)

Also, the Linux-HA/Pacemaker ecosystem (Heartbeat, ldirectord, etc.) sounds like it isn't really suited for EC2. (But then I found this - though I'm not sure this is really a high-quality solution).

I get a new elastic IP, I attach it to an instance, but it doesn't work? I can't ping the IP from my local computer either? Am I missing something here?

1. How do I use Amazon Elastic IP?
2. When is a new IP assign to an instance? When I turn it off and reboot?