Storing AWS Credentials on an EBS Snapshot Securely

July 19, 2010

Thanks to reader Ewout and his comment on my article How to Keep Your AWS Credentials on an EC2 Instance Securely for suggesting an additional method of transferring credentials: via a snapshot. It’s similar to burning credentials into an AMI, but easier to do and less prone to accidental inclusion in the application’s AMI. Read [...]

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Track Changes to your Dynamic Cloud Services Automatically

June 20, 2010

Dynamic infrastructure can be a pain to accommodate in applications. How do you keep track of the set of web servers in your dynamically scaling web farm? How do your apps keep up with which server is currently running what service? How can applications be written so they don’t need to care if a service [...]

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How I Moved 5% of All Objects in S3 with Jets3t

May 10, 2010

This is a true story about a lot of data. The cast of characters is as follows: The Protagonist: Me. The Hero: Jets3t, a Java library for using Amazon S3. The Villain: Decisions made long ago, for forgotten reasons. Innocent Bystanders: My client. Once Upon a Time… Amazon S3 is a great place to store [...]

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Elastic Load Balancing with Sticky Sessions

April 8, 2010

At long last, the most oft-requested feature for EC2′s Elastic Load Balancer is here: session affinity, also known as “sticky sessions”. What is session affinity? Why is this feature in such high demand? How can it be used with existing applications? Let’s take a look at these questions. But first, let’s explore what a session [...]

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EC2 Reserved Instance Availability Zone Problem? No Problem.

March 17, 2010

You may know that Amazon Web Services Reserved Instances have some gotchas. One of these gotchas is that the availability zone in which the reservation is purchased cannot be changed. So if you need to use an instance in a different availability zone (e.g. if you hit InsufficientCapacity errors*) than your reservation, you’re out of [...]

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Top Ten Reasons Why You, a Developer, Should Come to CloudConnect

February 11, 2010

You’re a developer – or you want to be – writing software that uses cloud computing. Why should you care about the CloudConnect Conference? Here are the top ten reasons why it’s worth your while. Full disclosure: Nothing to disclose. I have no commercial connection to CloudConnect or its producers. #10: Snacks Enjoy short, sweet, [...]

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Creating Consistent Snapshots of a Live Instance with XFS on a Boot-from-EBS AMI

January 17, 2010

Eric Hammond has taught us how to create consistent snapshots of EBS volumes. Amazon has allowed us to use EBS snapshots as AMIs, providing a persistent root filesystem. Wouldn’t it be great if you could use both of these techniques together, to take a consistent snapshot of the root filesystem without stopping the instance? Read [...]

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Use ELB to Serve Multiple SSL Domains on One EC2 Instance

December 24, 2009

This is one of the coolest uses of Amazon’s ELB I’ve seen yet. Check out James Elwood’s article. You may know that you can’t serve more than one SSL-enabled domain on a single EC2 instance. Okay, you can but only via a wildcard certificate (limited) or a multi-domain certificate (hard to maintain). So you really [...]

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Read-After-Write Consistency in Amazon S3

December 10, 2009

S3 has an “eventual consistency” model, which presents certain limitations on how S3 can be used. Today, Amazon released an improvement called “read-after-write-consistency” in the EU and US-west regions (it’s there, hidden at the bottom of the blog post). Here’s an explanation of what this is, and why it’s cool. What is Eventual Consistency? Consistency [...]

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The Open Cloud Computing Interface at IGT2009

December 4, 2009

Today I participated in the Cloud Standards & Interoperability panel at the IGT2009 conference, together with Shahar Evron of Zend Technologies, and moderated by Reuven Cohen. Reuven gave an overview of his involvement with various governments on the efforts to define and standardize “cloud”, and Shahar presented an overview of the Zend Simple Cloud API [...]

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