I've been trying to gather all the pieces together for setting up a load-balanced cluster of three servers (2 for Web nodes and one for MySQL) as a LAMP stack on EC2. This is only to run performance tests on an application, and I need to gather the appropriate information so that I can estimate the time it will take. I was wondering if someone could fill in the blanks for me about the following:
What exactly is a compute unit? I'm looking at needing three mirror instances of RightScale's AWS CentOS, two as Web nodes and one with a database. Do I need three small instances then?
If I'm using Apache as my Web server, is mod_proxy the best way to load balance on Amazon's EC2? I see Amazon has a load balancer that can be configured to work with Amazon CloudWatch to provide metrics. Is that a better way to go?
For application caching I want to use memcache. Any issues with this on Amazon's EC2? I'm thinking of using Siege (http://www.joedog.org/index/siege-faq) to do my stress testing. Does Amazon provide something already to do stress testing, or would this be an appropriate tool?
For someone like myself who has no experience using this service, aside from installing our application on both of the Web nodes, what sort of time are we looking at here? I'm familiar mostly with deploying applications on server instances and have some experience with server configurations and performance tuning, but I'm a programmer by trade. I'm thinking 30 hours for setup, and then probably another 15-20 for testing. Does that sound in the ballpark?