Moving to the Cloud – Making EC2 Usable for the Rest of Us

I’ve been messing around with hosting for what seems like a LONG time – my first domain name was registered in February of 1997, more than ten years ago.

It never gets simpler.

I started out with a shared hosting account with ProWebSites.com (long defunct), for almost $30 per month. Traffic and storage were measured in megabytes, those days, and no one even talked much about “up-time”.

When I started working at Ramsbottoms Computers in Nelson, I took over their “web hosting” department – which involved a bunch of local businesses, hosted off of an overbuilt desktop machine sitting on the desk in the back room. The best thing I did for them was get that server rebuilt into a rack-mounted box, and tucked into colocation in the only data-center in town.

Sometime early in 2000 I put my own server together, in the basement of an office building in Iowa. (It’s still there, actually.) Since then it’s been a succession of colo boxes, self-managed hosting… I’ve even run a couple of data centers.

Last week, the hard-drive started failing in one of my ServerBeach servers.
This, really, was the last straw.

I’ve had billing issues. I’ve had trouble-ticket issues. They won’t return phone calls (although they do reply to email – excessively. Usually I get a blank copy of any email I send to them – 10 minutes before I get an actual reply.) Now I’m getting hardware failures – I’m done. I’m leaving.

I decided it was time for EC2 – until I realized that the hosting services built on it where $500 a month minimum, and the alternative seemed to be a weird set of windows command line tools.

I went whining to Jesse Andrews:

4:52:13 PM JustJosh: do you know the gandi people?
4:52:18 PM JustJosh: can I get an invite?
4:52:57 PM jesse: ahh, that is new
4:53:00 PM jesse: have no invites
4:53:03 PM JustJosh: fucl
4:53:15 PM jesse: ec2 might be better for you
4:53:20 PM jesse: since you need more than a $8 slice
4:53:31 PM JustJosh: yeah
4:54:01 PM JustJosh: but I don’t really have time to figure out ec2 instances
4:54:24 PM jesse: install elasticfox
4:54:31 PM jesse: you can have a new slice in minutes
4:54:41 PM JustJosh: looking into it now
5:16:18 PM JustJosh: help
5:16:24 PM JustJosh: what AMI should I start with?
5:16:27 PM JustJosh: there are a PILE of them

Etc, etc.

Let me start out by saying that ElasticFox ROCKS – James Greenfield took an entirely broken experience, and managed to make it only MOSTLY broken.

But there was one absolutely critical function that elasticfox DIDN’T do – save an AMI image of your running instance, back to S3.

So I added it.

There are a lot of caveats, of course – I’m still hacking wildly. No guarantees on anything but Mac. But seriously, it’s a lot better than the alternative.

Go download it, and try it out.

$Magic \"Build Image\" Button$

PS – SpandexFox.com is running on EC2.

PPS – EC2 got elastic storage today – SpandexFox will have support SOON, I promise.

ec2, extension, ff3, mozilla, spandexfox, tech

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 and is filed under tinyapps. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

#1 by Angela Ramirez at August 21st, 2008

Hi Joshua!

I apologize for any troubles you have experienced at the Beach. A SB representative will contact you tomorrow to ensure your hosting needs are exceeded.

Feel free to contact me at anytime.

Angela Ramirez
ServerBeach Brand Director
angela(AT)serverbeach.com

Quote

#2 by Jeff Barr at August 29th, 2008

Hi Joshua, SpandexFox seems cool. Are you interested in submitting patches back to ElasticFox? If so, just let me know and I will put you in touch with the right people here at Amazon.

#3 by Todd Nine at October 24th, 2008

Hi Joshua,
This plugin is great. I would like to contribute a bit of help in the QA department. I’m able to successfully upload my Amazon X509 certificate to the instance, but when I attempt to create the AMI, I receive the following error.

rm: cannot remove `/mnt/elastic-auto-basic-0*’: No such file or directory
the specified user certificate file /tmp/ec2-509-cert does not exist
try –help

When I take a look at /tmp, I see the the uploaded X509 certs don’t have the same path/filename as the one given to the command to create the AMI image. I have the following certs in /tmp after the upload.

ec2-509-cert-josh ec2-instance-key-josh

This appears to be due to a string error in the preferences.js file on line 165. If you remove the “-josh” to the cert arguments. Once I fixed this the process appears to die on on the “mke2fs” command. Could you post a quick screencast or directions on how you get this to work on your Mac? I’d like to test it and help stabilize it so we can use this to easily build servers for demos. I have the fixed jar, please let me know if you would like me to send it to you.

#4 by admin at October 28th, 2008

Todd,

Been out of town for a few days. Will have a look at this tonight and try and get something posted. Thanks so much for the QA!

Joshua

#5 by moving labor boston at May 17th, 2009

Moving from one host to another is just like relocating to another house. Adjustments must be made and adapting is a must. And most of all, we learn to embrace change.

#6 by Anderson at June 17th, 2009

great post is this

#7 by cheap compuetrs at August 21st, 2009

This sure is a very generous option and hope it works out fine.

#8 by Resume Templates at September 15th, 2009

Good to know that you're top of things Angela, I guess me and the family have nothing to worry about with our planned trip there.

#9 by morgage31 at October 6th, 2009

Woow This is best blog i have read on the tpoic

regards
jaine
______________________________________________
aion kina | Cheap Aion kinah

#10 by Storage Slough at October 9th, 2009

I would really love to hear more of this stuffs, I'll try to contact you or someone else whenever I need some..

#11 by millipo11 at December 25th, 2009

No, Windows is not a virus. Here's what viruses do:

1.They replicate quickly – okay, Windows does that.

2.Viruses use up valuable system resources, slowing down the system as they do so – okay, Windows does that.

3.Viruses will, from time to time, trash your hard disk – okay, Windows does that too.

4.Viruses are usually carried, unknown to the user, along with valuable programs and systems. – Sigh.. Windows does that, too.

5.Viruses will occasionally make the user suspect their system is too slow (see 2) and the user will buy new hardware. – Yup, Windows does that, too.

Until now it seems Windows is a virus but there are fundamental differences: Viruses are well supported by their authors, are running on most systems, their program code is fast, compact and efficient and they tend to become more sophisticated as they mature.

So Windows is not a virus.

It's a bug.

#12 by Wholesale TV Services at December 29th, 2009

Man, you are on fire today. Great posts

Thanks
Justin Kemp
______________________________________________

#13 by millipo12 at January 8th, 2010

A smart blonde and a dumb blonde both jump off a cliff at the same time. Who lands first?

The dumb blonde because smart blondes don't exist.

regards
Robinson
______________________________________________
acne treatment during pregnancy | home remedies for acne | acne scar home remedies | how to cure back acne

#14 by millipo21 at January 16th, 2010

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#15 by millipo20 at January 18th, 2010

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#16 by millipo21 at January 19th, 2010

Cognition

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