Lonely Lion » cloud

Amazon Gets Relational

Chris — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:49:09 +0000

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?

Day of Cloud: Amazon EC2

View more presentations from cmcavoy.

Now, with video:

Amazon EC2 Without A Custom AMI

Chris — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:05:55 +0000

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!

Migrating MySQL to Amazon SimpleDB

Chris — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:02:23 +0000

I started playing around with Amazon’s SimpleDB this week. I knew I wanted to move portions of an existing MySQL database to it, but slowly realized that it was probably just easier to upload the whole thing. I added my finished script to the Python Cookbook as Recipe 576548: Converting MySQL database to an Amazon Simple DB database.

It worked for me, it will probably work for others. With a little TLC, it could probably be a bit easier to run. It’s really more of a rumor than a recipe. Regardless, it let me put a bunch of data into the cloud quickly. Sort of quickly. It turns out, SimpleDB is pretty slow for uploading. My first version of the script was single threaded, it took forever. I threw together a simple thread doo-dad, and it seems to have sped up. Although I didn’t time it.

This whole cloud thing has me sort of giddy. When I finish what I’m working on, I’ll write it up.