Amazon EC2 testing

Today's blog entry's purpose is to record a few bits of information I gathered playing around with Amazon's EC2 service.

As always, I investigate the latest and greatest in tech. This enables me to best advise clients' - even if the market here in Vancouver lacks enough clientele progressive enough to implement SaaS style services in earnest - I push on in the name of the next epoch of computing - the cloud!

Here is a quick summary of my test.

• I signed up for S3 (I'm already an avid JungleDisk user) and EC2 services with Amazon AWS.
• Installed Elasticfox and S3Fox Organizer plugins for Firefox
• Created a keypair - and saved the .pem file to my hard disk
• Setup a security group
• Setup a persistent volume - EBS Volume
• Created 2 instances of the 64bit version of Win2k3 Datacenter
• Using the .pem file, I was able to get the Administrator password for both machines and RDP into them
• I made both machines members of the same workgroup
• I was able to copy files back and forth their \\10.x.x.x\c$ shares
• Attaching the EBS Volume, instantly made that drive appear on the paired instance machines Disk Management area under Computer Management - then simple to format and attach that drive to a drive letter
• I then setup a Bundle as AMI job on one of the instances - this needs to be stored in an S3 bucket - created using the S3Fox Organizer
• After this new custom AMI was created - I fired a few instances up
• Passwords, and all changes were carried over - a perfect clone

I do see further testing is required for clients who need a quick solution for "on demand" render farms. The challenge would be -

• Would we connect the VMs to the local network via VPN connections?
• Would we get all render nodes to access files and element data via VPN?
• Or is it better to have it setup as a standalone setup?