elastic8

We've got another section with S3 tools . This should be with tools related to Amazon EC2 (elastic compute cloud). The official amazon list is here

So, free tools:

The title says it all.
The following article(articles if i'm gonna find more) is (are) about the opportunities and new things that Amazon's services could be used for.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_46/b4009001.htm?

This is a remake of the list done by Jeremy Zawodny (and brought to my attention by Martin), but i'll try to keep an up to date list. You should check the original list as there are alot of useful comments and ideeas over there and also check the list at amazon.

So, free tools:

So we've got and AWS account and we've got acces to EC2 and S3. Now everything is fine and nice, and i want to backup some of the data on my EC2 instance (let's say /etc and /var/lib/mysql ) and some data from another server ( the company's emails beeing that data) .
We've got the right tools, so let's backup the data, we never know when we'll be happy that even if the data center was hit by a meteorite we've got all the data backed up and tommorow we'll have everything back and running. But , wait, i see e problem, and the problem is the S3 acces method (the credentials). I have only one account that i'm using for uploading my ec2 images (this beeing done by an automated script that takes a snapshot of the system from time to time), for uploading the /etc dir from my etc instance and /var/lib/mysql from the same instance , and for backing up the emails from the company mail server (which is outside amazon). If we would have more machines, we would have more stuff to backup from different places , so more machines would have the s3 credentials.

Maybe i'm gonna write something comprehensive later on this topic ( because i have to do some reading on the topic), but
in the meantime this is a good article on mysql replication and the new possibilities.
Other cool stuff you can do .. when popping up multiple instances because of your site being slashdotted you could do basic load balancing using round robin dns with small ttl values for your dns entries (so you can add and remove hosts on the fly and have the updates taken into account). The dns part is fairly simple to do.

Still looking, searching, reading for some way to have good, decent and often backups of the machine because if the power goes down or something happens, when the instance goes down .. you lose the data inside the instance.

Saw that there are threads about this on amazon's aws ec2 forum. Amazon's staff say that they are thinking about this and how they could provide either a database service (mysql or something else) or some kind of really useful and permanent storage (like the 160GB /mnt partition, but that doesn't wipe when your instance goes down).

The service that is already available and everybody is expecting to provide persistent storage is Amazon's S3 ( Simple Storage Service ). It's kind of a huge and cheap storage service, a walkthrough is available here. The problem for the time being is that there are no stable linux implementations.

So i installed Debian Sarge on Amazon's EC2 service.

The thing is, Amazon doesn't give you a static ip address or dns name ... so either use a dynamic dns service (something like no-ip, dyndns or any other one) or do your own thing.

I chose to do my own, and found this piece of software . They offer a service too, but i used only the software and installed the daemon on another machine i use (outside amazon). Though Debian Sarge has Dhis in the package collection, it's an older release which doesn't work with bind9 so i had to install from source.

So i was asked by Martin to take a look at EC2 and S3 . Without knowing anything i got on amazon's site related to AWS (Amazon Web Services) and started to read the docs.

We all know it's a cliche, but here it goes.

Hello world.

You're probably wondering what is elastic8.com and how it can help you. elastic8.com is an unofficial blog about our thoughts and experiences with EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) service from Amazon, currently in beta. We'll write here our experiences using the service, tips and tricks and all sort of nice stuff.

So hang around for some interesting things. Oh, and by the way, this blog is hosted on EC2. :)