Best practices for AWS

When using MongoDB, we can use our own servers in a datacenter, a MongoDB hosted solution like MongoDB Atlas, or get instances from Amazon using EC2. EC2 instances are virtualized and share resources in a transparent way with collocated VMs in the same physical host. So there are some more considerations to take into account if going down that route:

• Use EBS optimized EC2 instances.
• Get EBS volumes with provisioned IOPS (I/O operations per second) for consistent performance.
• Use EBS snapshotting for backup and restore.
• Use different Availability Zones for High Availability and different regions for Disaster Recovery.
  Different availability zones within each region that Amazon provides guarantee that our data will be highly available. Different regions should only be used for Disaster Recovery in case a catastrophic event ever takes out an entire region. A region can be EU-West-2 for London, whereas an availability zone is a subdivision within a region; currently two availability zones are available for London.
• Deploy global, access local.
• For truly global applications with users from different time zones, we should have application servers in different regions access data that is closest to them using the right read preference configuration in each server.