Posts tagged as:

aws

Recapture Unused EC2 Minutes

February 28, 2011

How much time is “wasted” in the paid-for but unused portion of the hour when you terminate an instance? How can you recapture this time – which represents compute power – and put it to good use? After all, you’ve paid for it already. This article presents a technique for repurposing an instance after you’re [...]

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AWS Auto-Scaling and ELB with Reliable Root Domain Handling

January 24, 2011

Update May 2011: Now that AWS Route 53 can be used to allow an ELB to host a domain zone apex, the technique described here is no longer necessary. Cool, but not necessary. Someone really has to implement this. I’ve had this draft sitting around ever since AWS announced support for improved CloudWatch alerts and [...]

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Using Elastic Beanstalk via command-line on a Mac? Keep that OS X Install DVD handy

January 19, 2011

The title pretty much says it all. Elastic Beanstalk is the new service from Amazon Web Services offering you easier deployment of Java WAR files. More languages and platforms are expected to be supported in the future. Most people will use the service via the convenient web console, but if you want to automate things [...]

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Using AWS Route 53 to Keep Track of EC2 Instances

December 22, 2010

This article is a guest post by Guy Rosen, CEO of Onavo and author of the Jack of All Clouds blog. Guy was one of the first people to produce hard numbers on cloud adoption for site hosting, and he continues to publish regular updates to this research in his State of the Cloud series. [...]

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S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage with Simple Notification Service: What, Why, and When

July 22, 2010

AWS recently added support for receiving Simple Notification Service notifications when S3 loses a Reduced Redundancy Storage S3 object. This raises a number of questions: What the heck does that even mean? Why would I want to do that? Under what conditions does it make financial sense to do that? Let’s take a look at [...]

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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 [...]