20 November 2007
A friend of mine recently signed up with Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service. He tried it on a whim and then told me about how awesome it is. I signed up for my own account and gave it a spin. Wow. I’m really impressed. It’s freakin’ awesome.
The premise is pretty interesting. You get a virtual instance of a system, and it runs on Amazon’s hardware. Which means, you set up what is for all intents and purposes a real live server to which you have full root privileges, and you can take it on- or off-line on the fly. There are many applications for which this could be useful. When I read about this, I immediately knew how I could put it to use.
I have a client who needs to import three-plus gigabytes of data into a MySQL database once every day. It saps the web server’s resources and it’s becoming a bigger problem over time. I set him up with a new server, which helped, but not too long after I realized that we needed something better and more powerful. I’m doing some testing to see how I could use the EC2 service to offload some of the web server’s duties.
For most applications the setup is pretty simple. You get an account and choose from an array of pre-built system images to run on the service. The one that I’m currently testing with - the Fedora Core image with MySQL preinstalled - has pretty much everything included on it that I need for this job. I really didn’t need to modify any of the installed packages or install any additional packages. Getting the command & control software to work on my client’s web server was pretty straightforward, and Amazon provides fantastic, easy-to-understand documentation.
On my first glance, EC2 is pretty incredible. I might write more about my experience with it as I spend more time using the service.
Tags: aws, Computing, ec2, linux, Work
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