Posts tagged as:

ec2

Avoiding EC2 InsufficientInstanceCapacity: Insufficient Capacity Errors

October 17, 2009

Here’s a quick tip from this thread on the AWS EC2 Developer Forums. If you experience the InsufficientInstanceCapacity: Insufficient Capacity error, you’ll be glad to know there are some strategies for working around it. Justin@AWS offers this advice: There can be short periods of time when we are unable to accommodate instance requests that are [...]

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Cool Things You Can Do with Shared EBS Snapshots

September 24, 2009

I’ve been awaiting this feature for a long time: Shared EBS Snapshots. Here’s a brief intro to using the feature, and some cool things you can do with shared snapshots. I also offer predictions about things that will appear as this feature gains adoption among developers. How to Share an EBS Snapshot Really, it’s easy. [...]

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How to Keep Your AWS Credentials on an EC2 Instance Securely

August 31, 2009

If you’ve been using EC2 for anything serious then you have some code on your instances that requires your AWS credentials. I’m talking about code that does things like this: Attach an EBS volume Download your application from a non-public location in S3 Send and receive SQS messages Query or update SimpleDB All these actions [...]

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Elastic Load Balancer: An Elasticity Gotcha

August 14, 2009

If you use AWS’s Elastic Load Balancer to allow your EC2 application to scale, like I do, then you’ll want to know about this gotcha recently reported in the AWS forums. By all appearances, it looks like something that should be fixed by Amazon. Until it is, you can reduce (but not eliminate) your exposure [...]

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Mount an EBS Volume Created from Snapshot at Startup

August 7, 2009

There are many posts about how to mount an EBS volume to your EC2 instance during the startup process. But requiring an instance to use a specific EBS volume has limitations that make the technique unsuitable for large-scale use. In this article I present a more flexible technique that uses an EBS snapshot instead. Update [...]

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EC2 Instance Belonging to Multiple ELBs

July 23, 2009

I discovered an interesting feature of Amazon EC2 Elastic Load Balancing today: you can add an EC2 instance to more than one ELB virtual appliance. Below I demonstrate the steps I took to set up two ELBs each containing the same instance, and afterward I explain how this technique can be used to deliver different [...]

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The EC2 Instance Life Cycle

July 22, 2009

Working with virtual infrastructure is not a whole lot different than using real hardware, but it’s easy to get confused when things are different. In this article I’ll take a look at the life cycle of Amazon EC2 instances and how it differs from the traditional life cycle of real computers. Update January 2010: This [...]

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Copying ElasticFox Tags from One Browser to Another

July 15, 2009

The ElasticFox Firefox extension allows you to tag EC2 instances, EBS volumes, EBS snapshots, Elastic IPs, and AMIs. ElasticFox’s tags are stored locally within Firefox, so if you use ElasticFox from more than one browser your tags from one browser are not visible in any other browser. In this article I demonstrate how to copy [...]

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Boot EC2 Instances from EBS

July 14, 2009

EBS offers the ability to have a “virtual disk drive” whose lifetime is independent of any EC2 instance. You can attach EBS drives to any running instance, and any changes made to the drive will persist even after the instance is terminated. You can also set up an EBS drive to be the root filesystem [...]

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The “Elastic” in “Elastic Load Balancing”: ELB Elasticity and How to Test it

July 12, 2009

Update March 2012: Amazon published their own official guide to ELB’s architecture and building and testing applications that use it. The official material is very consistent with the presentation offered here, more than two and a half years prior. Elastic Load Balancing is a long-anticipated AWS feature that aims to ease the deployment of highly-scalable web [...]

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