Ever since returning from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last month, I have been excited about learning how to setup a machine in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). My first goal was just to get a Linux machine running in the cloud on which later I will try to install enough software to get a basic web application running.To learn what to do, I consulted a the Programming Amazon Web Services book which is fortunately available on Safari Online. In parallel I read the Getting Started Guide on Amazon's website. The steps to get a virtual machine running were roughly the following:
- Register for Amazon EC2.
- Download a X.509 certificate private key and public key pair and store them in a ~/.ec2 directory on my computer.
- Take note of my AWS account number.
- Download the Amazon EC2 Command-Line Tools
- Set environment variables: EC2_HOME, EC2_PRIVATE_KEY, EC2_CERT
- Run ec2-describe-images -o self -o amazon to search for images.
- Generate keypair using ec2-add-keypair gsg-keypair
- Fired up the Getting Started AMI with ec2-run-instances ami-2bb65342 -k gsg-keypair
- Open SSH and HTTP ports: ec2-authorize default -p 22, ec2-authorize default -p 80
- SSH into the instance: ssh -i id_rsa_gsg_keypair root@ec2-75-101-209-13.compute-1.amazonaws.com
- Access the instance's web server: http://ec2-75-101-209-13.compute-1.amazonaws.com/
- Shutdown the instance: ec2-terminate-instances i-db6ea2b2
2 comments:
As far as Ubuntu AMIs go, you are welcome to use one of the ones listed here: http://alestic.com
I would recommend starting with the Hardy or Gutsy base install.
We also have a group for Ubuntu on EC2 here: http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu
As for preserving data, you might want to search the EC2 forum as this is an important, complex, and hotly debated topic: http://ec2forum.notlong.com
--Eric Hammond
There is a pretty cool place to not only build an image but also have it deployed to your cloud with a web based management interface.
http://es.cohesiveft.com
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