Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Beta) Technology Overview

A bit of theory.

Amazon introduced a new service that is currently in the testing phase.
This is nothing but 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.
What allows you to do everything with the server.
In total per month, in case of 24/7 instance, the price will be $ 0.10 * 24 * 31 = $ 74 minimum $ 74 per month, why at least for the simple reason that Amazon will also take into account the transit of traffic:

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

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And here is the price tag for instances, 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 from you, as well as 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 you restart the server, 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 inapplicable for people who are developing or testing their application.

A little practice.

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

Using API

-1- You need to install the latest JRE .
-2- It is necessary to download and unpack in C: \ ec2 Amazon command line tools .
-3- You need to get your certificates .
-4- You need to create a file with: \ ec2 \ ec2.bat as follows:

echo off
set EC2_HOME = c: \ ec2
set PATH =% PATH%;% EC2_HOME% \ bin
set EC2_PRIVATE_KEY = .pem
set EC2_CERT = <Ur X.509 Certificate> .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 settings, open cmd and run:

> 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 using ssh protocol.

> ec2-add-keypair my-key

The key that he throws in the console must be saved. And also with convert to the Putty format, if you plan to use this application. This can be done with the help of the utility puttygen.exe, it is specially created for this purpose.

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

> 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 I launched a virtual machine from Oracle , preloaded with Oracle Database 11g, and also configured by the Enterprise manager and Oracle application express.

After that we wait 10 minutes and everything, your instance is ready to work, it 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

Everything.
> ec2-describe-instances
Once again we execute the command, copy the instance name, something like ec2 * .compute - *. Amazonaws.com

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

That's all.

Use the plugin for firefox.

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

After these manipulations, you can do all the steps necessary to create a virtual machine with the help of this application. I will not describe this in detail, but I’d better give a link to the screencast .

That's all. Everyone who spent time reading this material thank you so much.

Later there will be a separate article about Oracle on EC2, as well as the Amazon DevPay system will be described.

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