Monday, June 04, 2007

More Excitement About EC2

I fell further in love with EC2 today. I needed to set up a quick and dirty web cluster to test some stuff out (working, as I do, for a distributed computing company) and I didn't have any spare machines at my disposal. Not to fret, I thought to myself... EC2 to the rescue.

In minutes (in between meetings), I had a machine up and running. I installed the software I needed (Java, Tomcat, Terracotta, etc.). In a few more minutes (a little later in the day, between two other meetings), I baked that instance out as a machine image and deployed it on three separate instances.

In less than an hour's work, I had a three-machine web cluster up and running, serving pages over the Internet, and ready for my testing. Even better, I can continually bake out the state of my cluster and publish those images so other people can run the same test themselves.

It's astounding how easy it is to set up a complex computing environment with EC2.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Totally agree with you there, I actually moved my dedicated server over to EC2 for rifers.org, blablalist.com, uwyn.com, our SVN repositories, Drone, etc ...

Actually, I was thinking of writing an article about using EC2 with Tomcat and Terracotta. It would be cool to write some load detection tools that auto-launch or shutdown instances, based on the load of the cluster. We could create a public image of this for people to start working from. Imho this would be the coolest and easiest way to try out and adopt Terracotta in a real world setting.

Orion Letizi said...

Yep. Great idea.

Orion Letizi said...

I'm most of the way through building an AMI with Terracotta installed and ready to run some of the demos. With any luck, I'll be able to publish it tomorrow.

I was thinking of making a little video on how to use it.

I used centos per your suggestion...

Orion Letizi said...

So... it's proving a little more difficult to create a public AMI than I thought. But, RightScale has a
nifty AMI creation script that they use to create their public CentOS AMI
that I started playing with on Friday.

Anonymous said...

Gotten any closer to a releasing a public AMI for terracotta/ec2 integration?

Orion Letizi said...

hrmm... not really. I asked Dave to take this over because he's a real sysadmin and I'm not. This was sort of a personal project of mine, but if you really want it, I'd add a feature request and vote for it.