Posts in category "aws"

New job and learning AWS in support of distributed computing. I’ve done a good bit of research to understand the ecology of web services. They can be expensive but when you count total costs, they come out pretty close to break-even. You can lease computational power for relatively short periods to do quick work, then give the hardware back and stop paying for it. That is a powerful shift in technology.

OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus and a couple others where in the running while doing the evaluations. Each had their advantages which I’ll probably write about later.

I settled on implementing a Eucalyptus system using spare hardware. So far I’ve got a working and running system built from the source code. It provides a subset of the AWS services on local hardware for testing. The S3 support isn’t quite there as of version 3.3.0 but it might improve in the next couple of months. S3 is simple storage interface allowing for storing information by a key value. Their EC2 support appears to be much better and allows for quickly building virtual machines with pre-configured operating systems.

In the background, I’m writing Java code to implement AWS tools and services. I forgot how much fun Java can be.

I’m not going to give a full run down of what Eucalyptus is but just point you to their marketing material at their website. The quick summary is it offers the Amazon Web Services loaded on a local computer. These include several of the most interesting services: EC2, S3, EBS, AMI, IAM, and recently they added Autoscaling, Elastic Load Balancer, and Cloudwatch. If that alphabet soup has your interest piqued, then you should continue reading.

Building one of these using their pre-packaged images is dead simple. I’m not one to do anything the simple way and decided to build everything from the source directly from their Github repository. This was not an easy task but definitely taught me a lot about their software and the components of the system. I would recommend a first-time user to not take my route and just take their binary builds from RPM or their ISO image. Fedora Core has these as well and the guy who supports it is a great guy. Please take the path of least resistance first to get familiar with the software.

My first step was to review the major services we wanted to use on Amazon. They have a massive set of services available for use and some are not easily replicated without a major infrastructure and skill set to manage it. To give you some idea of the number of services here is a summary of the services and a quick reference as of August 2013.