Ideas….

I decided that I wanted to create an EBS backed AMI on Amazon’s Cloud Computing platform.  I thought this would be REALLY hard.  I was completely wrong.

The first thing I did was start with an already existing EBS AMI. Right now there aren’t too many available but they are growing.  I chose an Ubuntu 9.04 image since I’m going to install a stack on it, and I’ve already done *most* of it before on Ubuntu.

A quick note: it is possible to create an EBS AMI from an S3 AMI, but I wasn’t able to figure that out (quickly).  Although I did find a script that will do this for you: http://gist.github.com/249915.

Next, I wanted to get the Ubuntu server prepared.  I needed to:

• install mysql — http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/install-mysql-server-5-on-ubuntu/
• install ruby on rails — http://www.hackido.com/2009/04/install-ruby-rails-on-ubuntu-904-jaunty.html (up to and including step 6)
• install zlib — http://www.techsww.com/tutorials/libraries/zlib/installation/installing_zlib_on_ubuntu_linux.php
• install blacklight — http://projectblacklight.org (includes solr and a number of gem dependencies)

I did all of this.  One thing I noticed, Blacklight requires me to use non-standard ports (ie not 22 and 80).  While the server was running, I went into the AWS console and opened ports for its associated security group.  The changes took effect immediately.  I definitely liked that.

Finally, I went in to the AWS Management Console and chose “Create Image (EBS AMI)”.

Then I filled in the information including a description of my image:

and voila! EBS backed AMI.  the one caveat is:

DON’T TERMINATE THE INSTANCE UNTIL THE NEW AMI HAS FINISHED BEING CREATED

because then you’ll loose all the work that you have just done.  doh!

A while back I thought about ditching my current web host (a.k.a. my friend Andrew) and using Amazon EC2 for my website.  I determined since Andrew is a great guy (and gives me a REALLY cheap rate) I will never do that.  Today though I rethink that decision (although I’ll prolly continue to go with Andrew cause he still is a great guy).

Why am I rethinking it?  Well today Amazon EC2 realeased three new features; Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing.

Amazon CloudWatch keeps a number of different metrics on how your AMIs are being utilized (CPU utilization, Network I/O, etc.).  And you can access the data either through the API or commandline tools (it would be nice though if this were built into the Management Console though).

Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing work in conjunction with Amazon CloudWatch to help you get the most out of your EC2 instances.  Auto Scaling allows you to define certain conditions that, when present, allow you to perform certain actions (like scale up your instances or scale them down).  Elastic Load Balancing automatically spreads the load of traffic amongst your EC2 instances based on the metrics provided by CloudWatch.

All in all pretty cool, however I would love to see it all built into the management console rather than just available through the API and commandline tools (I am lazy afterall Amazon).  If you want to read more check out Amazon Web Services’ Blog or follow the links above.

Amazon Web Services announced they are now offering grants for educational institutions.

They have broken up their grants into 3 sections: researchers, educators, students.  They also mentioned that they are working with IT companies to provide services for IT Professionals on campus (including a company that uses AWS for email archiving).

Of course Amazon mentioned some big institutions using AWS in their classrooms (including UMD and Harvard), but here at Wheaton College Professor Tom Armstrong is using AWS for a distributed computing assignment.