Amazon EC2 Experience

Well,

I gave the Amazon Clouds a whirl. I have to say it was quite enlightening.

First, I watched the video tutorial on YouTube. It is pretty good at walking you through the setup step by step.

Using the Elasticfox plugin for Firefox basically makes the whole setup a point and click experience. In about two minutes you can start up a fully set up server chosen from a multitude of system images. I selected Fedora with MySQL and Apache. If I wanted to, I could have provisioned and started 100 servers with a touch of a button.

The one thing that gave me a bit of a hassle was getting the private key/SSH stuff to work under Windows. The tutorial is run on a Mac so he just uses the SSH command and passes it a .pem file which he generated with Elasicfox. However, as I was using Putty, I first had to run the Puttygen utility to convert the .pem file to a private key (ppk) file in Putty format. In Puttygen, select the Conversions menu item, and load the .pem file. Then press the "Save private key" button to create a .ppk file. You can specify the PPK file when you open a Putty session by drilling down into the Connection->SSH->Auth tree and specifying the .ppk file as the private key file for authentication.