Ec2

Reading AWS’s recent announcement of the AWS Marketplace you would think that it provides a catalog of click-to-deploy, highly-available, scalable applications running on EC2. You’d be partially right: the applications available in the AWS Marketplace are deployable in only a few clicks. But highly-available and scalable services will be difficult to build using Marketplace images. Here’s why. Essential Ingredients of HA and Scalability on AWS AWS makes it easy to run scalable, HA applications via several features. Not all applications use all of these features, but it would be very difficult to provide scalable and highly available service without using at least one of these: ...

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 “done” with it, until the current billing hour is up. It’s inspired by a tweet from DEVOPS_BORAT: ...

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. These days he runs his startup Onavo which uses the cloud to offer smartphone users a way to slash overpriced data roaming costs. In this article, Guy provides another technique to track changes to your dynamic cloud services automatically, possible now that AWS has released Route 53, DNS services. Take it away, Guy. ...

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 these questions, and we’ll also do a bit of brainstorming (please participate!) to design a service that puts it all together. ...

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 on for a discussion of how to implement this technique. How to Store AWS Credentials on an EBS Snapshot This is how to store a secret on an EBS snapshot. You do this only once, or whenever you need to change the secret. ...

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 gets moved to a different machine? There are a number of techniques available, and I’m happy to share implementation code for one that I’ve found useful. ...

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 is - then we’ll cover why we want it to be sticky, and what ELB’s sticky session limitations are. [To skip directly to an explanation of how to use ELB sticky sessions, go toward the bottom of the article.] ...

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 luck - and you end up paying the on-demand price. Today at CloudConnect I chatted with Jeremy Edberg of Reddit and Joe Arnold of Cloudscaling, and we had an insight: there’s a workaround. Read on for more details. ...

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 can’t do it properly. Serving multiple SSL domains is one of the main use cases behind the popular request to support multiple IP addresses per instance. ...

Recently I answered a question on the EC2 forums about how to give third parties access to EC2 instances. I noticed there’s not a lot of info out there about how to work with contractors, consultants, or even internal groups to whom you want to grant access to your AWS account. Here’s how. First, a Caveat Please be very selective when you choose a contractor. You want to make sure you choose a candidate who can actually do the work you need - and unfortunately, not everyone who advertises as such can really deliver the goods. Reuven Cohen’s post about choosing a contractor/consultant for cloud projects examines six key factors to consider: ...