IBM devworks article on howto migrate a Linux application to the Amazon EC2 cloud and howto make your application more robust by employing a load balancer and persistent disk.
Archive for the ‘ec2’ Category
IBM howto migrate a GNU/Linux app to the Cloud
Friday, August 6th, 2010NASA Nebula Ubuntu cloud
Saturday, June 19th, 2010According to The Register NASA have started to build a private Nebula Cloud based on Ubuntu 10 and Eucalyptus Enterprise 2 which will likely underpin websites across the federal government.
Eucalyptus Enterprise works with the Xen and KVM hypervisors and the latest version has now been ported to VMware hypervisors as well, allowing for installation atop VMware’s vSphere, ESXi, and ESX virtualization technologies. The Eucalyptus Enterprise edition also includes an image converter that helps users develop VMware-based applications that are compatible with Amazon EC2.
Ubuntu 10.04 UEC EC2 AMIs
Friday, April 30th, 2010Ubuntu 10.04 UEC AMIs are now available for use and have been published to Ubuntu UEC Amazon EC2, and can be used immediately with no need to download anything. For further instruction on getting started with Amazon EC2, see the Ubuntu UEC Amazon EC2 Starters Guide.
ibm.com developerworks cloud series
Friday, January 29th, 2010The ibm.com developerworks cloud series explores the major types of cloud services and related software that you can use to build Web-scale systems.
In Part 1, learn how Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds provide basic services you can use to deploy and run your applications. The article also discusses how Eucalyptus can be used as an infrastructure to create public or private clouds.
In Part 2, learn about AppScale and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing. Explore the features and architecture of this virtual infrastructure. It’s a great way to test your Google App Engine applications on your local resources or virtualized cloud infrastructures, such as Amazon EC2 or Eucalyptus.
Amazon EC2 can now boot from Amazon EBS snapshots
Friday, December 4th, 2009Amazon EC2 has just announced the ability to boot instances directly from Amazon EBS snapshots, providing increased flexibility in how customers can manage their instances.
You can still save an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in an Amazon S3 bucket and boot it from the local instance store, but you can now also choose to save AMIs as Amazon EBS snapshots and boot directly from an Amazon EBS volume.
AMI MySQL cluster database access
Friday, October 2nd, 2009One of the challenges when deploying MySQL databases and clusters on Amazon EC2 AMIs is that the IP address of the AMIs are assigned dynamically. If your topology involves only a single instance then you can simply use localhost to access your MySQL server.
Cloud Foundry solves this problem by ensuring that ‘dbmaster’ always resolves to the IP address of the MySQL server or lets you launch the application with system property that specifies the MySQL server hostname.
Using the JVM option “-DdbHostName=${databasePrivateDnsName}” sets the the system property’dbHostName’ to the MySQL server’s host name. A Spring/Java application can then use a PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer bean to substitute this value into the database url, e.g. jdbc:mysql://${dbHostName}:3306/.
AWS security group(s) (cloudwall(s))
Friday, October 2nd, 2009The default Amazon Web Services (AWS) default (security) group (aka cloudwall/firewall) only allows access to AMIs from the same group. However you and your desktop or notebook or any customers PCs will not be in this group and therefore blocked even if you have setup key pairs (http://code.google.com/p/cloudtools/wiki/Ec2KeyPair) !
You’ll need to add security rules to ALLOW ports such as SSH (22), SMTP (25), HTTP (80) etc to be accessible from outside the group ie any IP in the world (0.0.0.0/0) instead of just that group !
Just login to your AWS Console select the Security Groups tab, select deafult group and create the new rule(s) and/or create new security groups. (http://code.google.com/p/cloudtools/wiki/EnablingSshAccess)
You may also want to allow your webserver instances to talk to your database servers in which case make sure you
- either ensure web servers and db servers are running in the same default group
or
- create a db servers (security) group that allow access from a web servers (security) group and make sure your webserver AMI(s) & db AMI(s) are running in the correct security group.
AWS Multi-Factor Authentication
Friday, October 2nd, 2009AWS Multi-Factor Authentication is an additional layer of security that offers enhanced control over your AWS account settings.
AWS MFA uses an authentication device that continually generates random, six-digit authentication codes solely for your use. Once you enable AWS MFA, every time somebody tries to sign in to your secure pages on the AWS website or AWS Management Console, access will only be granted after the correct Amazon email-id and password and the current code from your authentication device are provided.
JumpBox Cloud Gear
Thursday, July 30th, 2009JumpBox Cloud Gear lets you run any JumpBox in minutes using Amazon EC2 and gives you instant access to a broad array of Open Source web applications with just a few mouse clicks. There’s no upfront cost to use them and you only pay for your actual usage. The minimum time increment is one hour and that opens up all kinds of use cases that would normally be prohibitive.
IBM EC2 hourly pricing
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009You can now pay hourly for IBM DB2 & WebSphere sMash licences on Amazon EC2 !
- Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Express – starting at $0.38/hour
- Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Workgroup – starting at $1.31/hour
- Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere sMash – starting at $0.50/hour