Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Beta) Technology Overview

A bit of theory.

Amazon introduced a new service that is currently under testing.
This is nothing more than a kind of hosting 2.0.

In fact, Amazon offers you at a very good price, a virtual machine with a static IP, a good configuration and root access.
That allows you to do everything with the server.
In total per month, in the case of a 24/7 instance, the price will be $ 0.10 * 24 * 31 = $ 74 at least $ 74 per month, why at least for the simple reason that Amazon will also take into account traffic transit:

• $ 0.100 for 1 GB of any input into Amazon EC2
• $ 0.170 for 1 GB of any outgoing data out of Amazon EC2

And here is the instance price tag, the minimum configuration:

Price	Name	RAM	CPU	Platform	Real CPU
$ 0.10 / hour	Small Instance (Default)	1.7 GB	1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit	32-bit	vendor_id: AuthenticAMD cpu family: 15 model: 65 model name: Dual-Core AMD Opteron (tm) Processor 2218 HE stepping: 3 cpu MHz: 2599.998 cache size: 1024 KB
$ 0.40 / hour	Large instance	7.5 GB	2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each	64-bit
$ 0.80 / hour	Extra Large Instance	15 GB	4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each	64-bit

But there is one feature that I don’t really like - after turning off the virtual server, Amazon will actually take your IP address and delete your entire instance with all the data and settings, within 15 minutes - the time is always different, but I assume that the uninstall process starts immediately after the shutdown command. When the server reboots, nothing like this happens - you even save your IP.

This is not particularly critical for people who already have their own working Web project, but it is absolutely not applicable for people who are developing or testing their application.

A bit of practice.

How to start using? Simply.
-1- We go to the registration page , register, create an account, register a card.
-2- Further, ideally, it would be nice to read the documentation. It can be found here .
After that, you have two ways to use the service, the first set of utilities (API) from Amazon , or an extension for firefox.

Using the API

-1- You need to install the latest JRE .
-2- You need to download and unzip to C: \ ec2 Amazon command line tools .
-3- You must obtain your certificates .
-4- You must create a file with: \ ec2 \ ec2.bat with the following contents:

echo off
set EC2_HOME = c: \ ec2
set PATH =% PATH%;% EC2_HOME% \ bin
set EC2_PRIVATE_KEY = .pem
set EC2_CERT =.pem
set JAVA_HOME = C: \ Program Files \ Java \ jre1.6.0_01

Or you can simply register the path data in the Windows settings.

-5- to check the correctness of all the settings, open cmd and do:

> ec2.bat
> ec2-describe-images -a
If you see a list of virtual machine images, then all the settings are correct.

-6- Create key pairs that will be used to access your server via ssh protocol.

> ec2-add-keypair my-key The

key that he will throw into the console must be saved. And also with convert to Putty format if you plan to use this application. This can be done using the puttygen.exe utility, it is specially created for this purpose.

-7- After receiving the keys, you can begin to start the virtual machine.
You can select an image from the list using a command of the form:

> ec2-describe-images -o oracle

In this case, I filtered the list of virtual machines from Oracle .

> ec2-run-instances ami-cecb2fa7 -k my-key

And he launched a virtual machine from Oracle , preloaded with Oracle Database 11g, as well as configured Enterprise manager and Oracle application express.

After that, we wait 10 minutes and everything, your instance is ready to work, already has a static IP.

> ec2-describe-instances
Used to obtain information about existing instances.

Now it remains only to allow access to the server via the standard ssh port.
> ec2-authorize default -p 22

That's it.
> ec2-describe-instances
Once again, execute the command, copy the name of the instance, something like ec2 * .compute - *. amazonaws.com

And using the keys (see p. 6) and putty, we connect to this instance.

That's all.

Using the plugin for FireFox.

-1- Make sure you are using FireFox, and not any other browser.
-2- Install this plugin .
-3- In the browser window, enter chrome: //ec2ui/content/ec2ui_main_window.xul
-4- Click on Credentials and add your username and key pair (public private).
-5- By clicking IDs enter your username and number.

After these manipulations, you can do all the actions necessary to create a virtual machine using this application. I will not describe this in detail, but rather I will give a link to the screencast .

That's all. Many thanks to everyone who took the time to read this material.

Later, there will be a separate article on Oracle on EC2, and Amazon DevPay will also be described.

PS found a cool instruction , it describes in detail what I was trying to write here.