Amazon Elastic Cloud Service, EC2 is challenging
the IT industry in terms of how much control IT managers will have
of the cloud.
One part old Unix Mainframe terminals
One part hosted services - to fire
See step outlines below.
Amazon EC2 Service - Build & Deploy Demo [13:33]
This video outlines exactly how to get a server up an running in
the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment.
Key Steps
Create Amazon web services account
Create a Windows 2003 instance - an outline of a machine,
its CPU usage, configure security policy and define IP.
Set up Security Group - has customised firewall security
requirements. Separate server and application groups.
Give each instance a public IP address - assign to
server
Change the default Admin address - paste the key to
decrypt the old password, then log in and change the password
as normal.
Check pre-set - installation settings
Set up web server groups
Associate rights to each security group - all the normal
basic settings
Using your EC2 Server
If you need a complete server
Hot standby server, that can fire up immediately
Test server - application testing environment
Mobile server - only pay what you use [currently 14c per computing
hour] with crazy fast upload and dowload speed
Setting up Windows server enviroment - when Linux is the corporate
standard
Comparing EC2 with Standard Hosting Environment
Cost - For a server, $0.10 or $0.14/hour (monthly:
$72 and $100) is way more than standard hosting for similar hardware.
Persistence - the instance disk is ephemeral.
That means if the server crashes - you lose all your data from
that instance, so you need to be very confident in the service
provider. For persistent data, S3 and EBS do files and block devices,
respectively (at $0.15/gig/month). Snapshots are mandatory for
pro EC2 usage.
Overall - For the reasons above, EC2 is not yet accepted by a large
number of IT managers who believe that it doesn't yet compete compete
with standard hosting. However, they also agree that it does provide
a new solution for various non-core situations.
