I haven’t had a blog before - be prepared.
I’ve been kind of drawn to this new hype term ”Cloud Computing” a while now, I would guess from say, July this year. I wanted to test this stuff myself and actually did try Amazon AWS and GoGrid, but then decided to go with Amazon. I have been working with IT a few years and have experience with virtualization as well as IT outsourcing.
Looking at cloud computing from a sysadmin’s view point, I could even buy cloud computing to be a disruptive technology. It has the potential to change the way how IT works. Though, it could very well be that the fad faints as fast as it arrived. A disaster with the bigger cloud providers would probably start that process… let’s hope that will not happen. And, Sidekick/Danger/T-Mobile/Microsoft/Hitachi disaster was not a cloud offering, though at the moment every service delivered through Internet seems to be referred as a cloud application.
I chose Amazon as the IaaS provider because they are the market leader and had two availability zones in EU (I’m from Finland and sadly, rarely travelling). Having a low latency is kind of imperative with any command line tools and this was really annoying with GoGrid due to their geographical placement.
I also did buy a few books about the subject, though there are not too many published yet. I did like George Reese’s book Cloud Application Architectures and can recommend that as an introduction to Cloud Computing with Amazon. I also did buy a book about Google App Engine and one about Microsoft Azure, but since I am more interested about the infrastructure side, those are still to be read.
The first test I wanted to do was to install some form of a linux and then proceed to install some meaninful application. I chose WordPress to be the application which also implied installing Apache, PHP and MySQL as well. I also did use the Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for the Apache and MySQL database. XFS was used for the EBS partition. The system seems to run quite ok and is relatively responsive, at least when compared with guests on VMware Server running on my PC. Of course, you are testing it right at this moment yourself. This site and blog is that system: the cheapest server Amazon offers.
I should have added all the commands here, but did not write those down this time. In future tests, those will be added as well.
Pauli Haikonen
Tags: Amazon AWS, Cloud Computing
