We recently moved from a traditional Data Center to cloud computing on AWS. We are developing a product in partnership with another company, and we need to create a database server for the product we'll release. I have been using Amazon Web Services for the past 3 years, but this is the first time I received a spec with this very specific hardware configuration. I know there are trade-offs and that real hardware will always be faster than virtual machines, and knowing that fact forehand, what would you recommend? 1) Amazon EC2? 2) Amazon RDS? 3) Something else? 4) Forget it baby, stick to the real hardware Here is the hardware requirements This server will be focused on I/O and MySQL for the statistics, memory size and disk space for the images hosting. Server 1 I/O The very main part on this server will be I/O processing, FusionIO cards have proven themselves extremely efficient, this is currently the best you can have in this domain. o Fusion ioDrive2 MLC 365GB (http://www.fusionio.com/load/-media-/1m66wu/docsLibrary/FIO_ioDrive2_Datasheet.pdf) CPU MySQL will use less CPU cores than Apache but it will use them very hard, the E7 family has 30M Cache L3 wichi provide boost performance : o 1x Intel E7-2870 will be ok. Storage SAS will be good enough in terms of performance, especially considering the space required. o RAID 10 of 4 x SAS 10k or 15k for a total available space of 512 GB. Memory o 64 GB minimum is required on this server considering the size of the statistics database. Warning: the statistics database will grow quickly, if possible consider starting with 128 GB directly, it will help. This server will be focused on I/O and MySQL for the statistics, memory size and disk space for the images hosting. Server 2 I/O The very main part on this server will be I/O processing, FusionIO cards have proven themselves extremely efficient, this is currently the best you can have in this domain. o Fusion ioDrive2 MLC 365GB (http://www.fusionio.com/load/-media-/1m66wu/docsLibrary/FIO_ioDrive2_Datasheet.pdf) CPU MySQL will use less CPU cores than Apache but it will use them very hard, the E7 family has 30M Cache L3 wichi provide boost performance : o 1x Intel E7-2870 will be ok. Storage SAS will be good enough in terms of performance, especially considering the space required. o RAID 10 of 4 x SAS 10k or 15k for a total available space of 512 GB. Memory o 64 GB minimum is required on this server considering the size of the statistics database. Warning: the statistics database will grow quickly, if possible consider starting with 128 GB directly, it will help. Thanks in advance. Best,