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/Hosting/Amazon/EC2:
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web service
I have been hearing a lot of buzz about "cloud computing"[1] and particularly about Amazon's version[2][6]. Finally, I have been hired by a client to build a server using the Amazon service, and get to try it out.
I am still in the early stages, but I am not seeing yet how Amazon's "Compute Cloud" is fundamentally different from your average "Virtual Private Server" (VPS) service. They do provide a capability of saving spanshots of a machine, and then redeploying copies of that snapshot to multiple other machines. I guess that is kind of special....
The "Compute Cloud" is also not as user-friendly as your average VPS service. With the latter, setup is a matter of button pushing. With the former, you have to download and install a command line application, and jump through quite a few command line hoops to get things running. Not particularly difficult for an experience Linux sysadmin, but GUI addicts definitely will find themselves challenged. This article[3] should provide a good appreciation, and most or all of the details, of getting an Amazon server up and running.
Note that Amazon seems to really like Fedora, and most of their ready-made images seem to be Fedora-based. As a Debian user, I had to go a little further afield[4] to find a suitable Debian image[5] to install.
So far so good, it is running as I write, and was really not that hard to figure out.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
[2] http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2008-02-01/GettingStartedGuide/index.html?introduction.html
[3] http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/04/05/how-to-getting-started-with-amazon-ec2
[4] http://alestic.com/
[5] http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1615&categoryID=101
[6] http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/5654
posted at: 19:08 | path: /Hosting/Amazon/EC2 | permanent link to this entry