Amazon cloud computing

At last year's Exchange conference in Paris, I did a talk about cloud computing and Amazon EC2, along with Sheldon Borkin.

Among other things, I demonstrated how to run OpenEdge on Amazon EC2. At the time, local storage

for a running EC2 instance would disappear when the instance was stopped. The only permanent

storage was in S3 so you had to back up your database there.

Since then, Amazon has cured that problem and made quite a number of other improvements.

Slide deck for that talk is here: http://www.psdn.com/ak_download/media/exch_audio/2008/SOA/SOA-16_Bjorklund_Borkin.ppt

That should give you enough to get started and do some experiments. Make sure you shut down

your instance when you don't need to have it running. I left my demo server running for a few weeks

after the conference!

It is pretty easy to get an OpenEdge database and application running there. A bit more effort is required

to get all the Amazon networking stuff configured right, but it isn't that hard.

-gus

I left my demo server running for a few weeks after the conference!

Just out of curiosity's sake - how much does it cost to run something like this?

I don't suppose you had your test bed running during the recent Amazon hiccup?

Do we have any meaningful figures for probable uptime and uncompromised performance windows?

It is fairly inexpensive. My slide deck summarizes pricing.

There are various prices for different things (computing, storage, data transfer).

For a small cpu with

     1.7 GB of memory,

     1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit),

     160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform

it costs $0.10 per hour while the instance is running ($0.125 per hour if running Windoze).

My storage bill for the instance I created for the conference is 9 cents per month.

For an extra large cpu with

      15 GB of memory,

      8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each),

      1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

it costs $0.80 per hour. $1.00 per hour if running Windoze.

See http://aws.amazon.com/ec2 for details.

No, I did not have it running during any outages.

In general, EC2 has been pretty reliable, but not perfect.

Among the improvements made during the past year, there is now an uptime commitment

(there was not before). The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95%

availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.

So, that recent problem was about their allowance for the year ...

Quote: A bit more effort is required to get all the Amazon networking stuff configured right, but it isn't that hard.

Hi Gus, I'm finding it difficult to configure the VPN connection to the Amazon VPC & wonder whether you could offer any advise please?

I have one of the IPSec tunnel's connected, but since I'm not using a Cisco or Juniper router, I'm trying to use the generic device doco to configure my Cyberguard Snapgear SG575 router.

The 2 bits I'm stuck on are the GRE tunnels & the BGP setup.  My snapgear seems to support both. The GRE setup prompts for Remote External Address, Local External Address & Local Internal Address, but I'm not sure how this translates to the 2 outside & 2 inside addresses supplied by VPC.

And the BGP setup prompts me with an empty zebra.conf & bgpd.conf setup file - & I'm not sure how to populate either.

I don't suppose you have anything that might point me in the right direction please?

Thanks & regards,

Bernie.

berniep@gmail.com

Since you mentioned zebra.conf, I guess your Snapgear router may be running Linux. I'm not familiar with that router and I don't know anything about setting up BGP, so I'm ignorant enough to be useless. Except for one thing: you can find documentation on Zebra at zebra.org. But your snapgear docs ought to tell you how to set up BGP too.