

Ask YC: Suggestions for great "how to" EC2 articles - PStamatiou

I'd love to get my hands dirty with EC2 but don't even know where to start. I've searched around and found some articles that show how to get an instance up, load an AMI etc but the end result is the long Amazon url for the instance. How can I setup a load balancer instance, or at least communicate with EC2 with a separately hosted web front-end.<p>I don't have any use for EC2 yet but like any good hacker I just want to tinker.
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jdavid
EC2 and S3 rock.

I sit on the ec2ubuntu google group <http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu>

its a great group, and Eric Hammond created one of the best images i have seen
yet. the original image was only ~100MB in size. Eric has done a lot of work
to keep the images fast and small. He has put a number of optimizations in
that few of the other public images have.

As far as loadBalancing goes, we are going with Round Robin DNS until we HAVE
to move to something more compliecated.

Nettica offers some great tools for setting up Dynamic Round Robbin DNS
records.

RightScale is not so much a load balancing company as it provides you with
some webui stuff to manage servers. EC2 in firefox is a much better start.

WinSCP is a god send. It makes it so easy to put files on your instance. I am
still trying to figure out how to either Wine install WinSCP on my Ubuntu
install or to find a replacement.

if you need anything and are an ubuntu user, join the group and email me.

bandwidth between EC2 and S3 = 250Mb/s which is faster than most disks I know
of. Latency is about 20ms. Accessing 2 xml files during a read/write still
seems fast for the web.

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ropiku
I haven't played with EC2 yet (but it's on my list). I know about a firefox
plugin that helps manage instances
(<http://sourceforge.net/projects/elasticfox/>).

As far as I know you launch the instance, ssh on it and have fun. That url is
your instance address. You can make a loadb alancer by installing Apache or
Nginx on a server (instance or other) then from there proxy to your instances
(you'll have to open the ports). See the Nginx wiki for more documentation
(<http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxLoadBalanceExample>). If you need help
configuring the Nginx shout.

It's basically VPS but where you pay by the hour and it doesn't have a static
IP and persistent hdd. You can also use a AMI with what do you need (I saw
there was one for Rails).

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PStamatiou
"It's basically VPS but where you pay by the hour and it doesn't have a static
IP and persistent hdd. You can also use a AMI with what do you need (I saw
there was one for Rails)."

Yeah I'm looking to setup something where I can point a domain to a load
balancer instance (but if it needs to be restarted and changes instance URL,
the domain no longer points to the right one?) so I can essentially run an
entire site/app off of EC2. But then again it's probably better off to make a
regular server be the load balancer I'm guessing.

Since EC2 doesn't have persistent hdd - where do ppl keep databases? Not on S3
the latency would be up there.. in RAM on EC2?

I pre-ordered the O'Reilly EC2/S3 book months ago.. it should be shipping in
March I think.

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ropiku
Yes, that's the problem of using EC2 for webhosting, after restarting the
address of the instance changes. It's best to have a fixed reguler server and
then instances varied on demand. RightScale is a company that sells this kind
of services.

Those who use DB on EC2 (from what I read on the web) just don't restart their
instance and make backups to S3.

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kirubakaran
Have you read this?

EC2 for Python programmers [http://jimmyg.org/2007/09/01/amazon-ec2-for-
people-who-prefe...](http://jimmyg.org/2007/09/01/amazon-ec2-for-people-who-
prefer-debian-and-python-over-fedora-and-java/)

