> Eliminate shared hosting failover server – We may never do shared hosting failover again if we can not guarantee its security. We might do a non-realtime failover to automatically launch a new instance for you, but this experience taught us what a bad idea this can be.
What does realtime mean in this case? Anyway, this isn't the only option. They could keep a few bare instances of their php stack online and simply run the deploy script instead of the image creation script. That ought to be able to run in under ten seconds I think.
Realtime means a request in flight is retried if there's a failure. Said a different way, the load balancer already knows about a spare at all times. This is compared to a ~5 minute downtime if spawning a replacement EC2 instance is required.
What does realtime mean in this case? Anyway, this isn't the only option. They could keep a few bare instances of their php stack online and simply run the deploy script instead of the image creation script. That ought to be able to run in under ten seconds I think.