Enabling remote desktop on an ubuntu ec2 instance is pretty easy by using NX. We will use FreeNX at the server and NoMachine NX client on the client machine. NX is a much better alternative to VNC. You can install NoMachine client on windows, mac or linux. For more information visit http://www.nomachine.com
Recently Amazon launched RDS – Relational Database Service. Before Amazon offered this service, we had a MySQL configured on an ec2 instance. We needed one more database in cloud. Which way did we go? In this article, I have tried to compare both the options.
Increasing size of your ebs volume is pretty easy. resize2fs does the trick. Here is the detailed procedure to increase size of your ebs volume.
First detach the volume and take a snapshot of the volume. If you already have a snapshot and haven’t made any changes after that, no need to take a new snapshot.
Amazon documentation states that
Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define.
Simply put, it can start and stop ec2 instances based on a condition you define. This is especially important in an environment where you pay more for more capacity. Thus if a website has a defined traffic pattern such as traffic peaks every afternoon and goes down in the night, you can have autoscaling start more web servers in the afternoon and shut down unnecessary ones in the night. Isn’t that amazing?
Let’s say you have 10 ec2 instances up and they do various different kinds of work. Some are web servers, some are queue servers, some are cache servers and a cluster with hadoop/hbase. Have you found it hard to remember which server is which? Wouldn’t it be cool if Amazon let us name our servers?
We have found a solution. Ylastic provides an amazing and inexpensive web based interface for various AWS services. It allows you to name your ec2 instances and remembers it. If you have an autoscaling setup it will automatically name your autoscaled instances when they start e.g. webserver001, webserver002 etc.
Amazon recently announced a new feature which allows you to boot from an ebs volume. But it doesn’t provide any tools to convert your existing AMIs to this new type of image. There is no easy way to create an ebs image from scratch. There are some posts that explain how to convert your existing AMI into this new type of image using ec2-unbundle and dd (a linux utility). I am going to take a little different route and explain how we can create an ebs image from an existing instance. It’s fairly simple to create a new image using dd from an existing instance.
