I've been wanting an excuse to work with Amazon's various cloud computing services. In my world where building solutions that process terabytes of data is common, I have been struggling with scenarios that might be a good fit. Today I stumbled into a need.
I have a need to create a build box for our Aginity Netezza Workbench tool. Until now, development has been in the hands of a single person where we did not need to centralize the build. But now as we are expanding the development to more people and transitioning into a more formal process - we now have a need.
I had a lot of different options I could have chosen - but in the end I decided I would do it on one of the Amazon EC2 services. My reasoning is this:
· A build box is needed in small bursts of time throughout a week or day - with the remainder of the time having it sit idle waiting for a build event.
· Many of our projects crank up quickly and need a build box before our clients can set one up internally and grant access to it. It would be great to create one at the click of a button.
· We have source control persistently hosted already, so there is no need to continuously persist a build box.
· I needed an excuse to try the EC2 services
So for at least a little while, I plan to journal my first experience with EC2 here in my blog.
I started by heading to Amazon's Web Services site and signed up for an Amazon Web Services Account.
http://aws.amazon.com/
Signing up was as easy as making my first buy of a book from Amazon (other than one of those Captcha challenges)
Next I poked around setting up a server and getting access to it. The primary challenge is getting used to their terms and language - as well as. I created EC2 instances, key pairs, security, groups. Then deleted them.
I must admit, after about an hour spent on Day 1, I ended with nothing tangible other than a better grasp of the terms and order of steps to do what I want. A brief summary of what I learned
Key Pairs: This is to setup public and private key pairs used to decrypt certain information. In the case of setting up your first instance, you use this to decrypt your administrative password. Be sure to allow pop-up windows before you do this. If you fail to download the key file on the first pass, you will not get another chance (and thus need to try again on a new one).
Security Group: This defines the ports open for access. I used the default group but needed to add RDP to in order to get access.
Instance: This is a running instance of a server. I chose a small capacity Windows 2008 server so we could build a C# application. This is easiest to perform after Key Pairs and Security Groups have been successfully.
Total account cost: $0.00 (never started an instance)
Day 2 still ahead...