Archive for the ‘AWS’ Category
Amazon Gets Relational
Last week I gave an Amazon EC2 presentation at the Day of Cloud conference here in Chicago. My slides from the presentation cover some basics about EC2. It was a good day, lots of good speakers, and lots of attendees that were interested in getting their apps into the mysterious clooooouuudd.
The kicker is, I spent a fair amount of time explaining how to set up a relational database on EC2, just in time for Amazon to announce that they’re releasing very easy to use MySQL instances. Luckily, I have a half hour tomorrow at the Chicago Google Tools User Group to revisit the Amazon talk. I’ll revise the talk to focus on Amazon’s new offerings, specifically how to get a reasonable web app up on Amazon using RDS as a database back end.
I understand the irony of giving the talk at a Google tools group, but it can’t hurt to know how to move your applications off of AppEngine and on to other services. It’s all part of Data Liberation, right?
Now, with video:
Amazon EC2 Without A Custom AMI
I’ve been involved with a handful of EC2 deployments at PSC, and they’ve all ended up with a custom AMI. Basically, starting up an existing base Ubuntu server, installing and configuring packages, and saving the new image as a custom AMI. It’s not a bad way of doing things, but I had a nagging feeling that there was an easier way. Especially given the ease of deploying an AppEngine app. Granted, they’re two completely different animals, but still…there had to be something better.
Eric Hammond, of Alestic fame, answered a bunch of my nagging subconscious questions with the release of runurl. Now, you build and host your configuration scripts, and pass a list of the scripts to run on server start up through passed user-data scripts. In theory, it’s possible to start up a new base server, and automate the build out through hosted scripts. It means slower start up time, but significantly less configuration and AMI maintenance. For a webserver cluster, where you have some time to get new nodes up, this method makes more sense than the standard AMI-saving method. Nice work Eric!
