in Checking In, X-Geek

Up to speed on Amazon Web Services

I’ve been getting up to speed on Amazon Web Services over the past few weeks. With the end of the year bonus I got from my work I put down the money to get a 3-year reserved instance, gaining a hefty hosted server for a remarkably low price.

I’d had an Amazon instance for a few months just to kick the tires. However, when my reserved instance got purchased, it took me a while to figure out that Amazon had changed its virtualization techniques and in order to take advantage of the new instance I would have to convert my existing image to a completely new one. The blocker for this was that the CentOS-based AMI I used seemed locked and the root drive couldn’t be mounted to a new instance. I had to copy everything using the old instance.

My new instance was created completely by me, using a recipe that helped me build it from the ground up. Now that I have a good base to start from I can build some useful AMIs and share them with others. I hope to make a Rivendell Radio Automation AMI someday so that people can launch their own online radio station with a few clicks of a button.

I’ve also dug into the wonder that is S3, creating an s3fs “filesystem” on my Linux instance for serving up music for my Rivendell install. I will eventually do the same for the media included here on MT.net and push that to CloudFront.

The cool thing about the cloud is that it’s a geek’s ultimate laboratory. It’s incredibly easy and cheap to spin up computer sessions. I can play with technologies without having to commit to them long-term. I’m having a lot of fun with it.

I’m particularly proud that I was able to migrate the server that hosts my neighborhood email lists from a locally-hosted server over to AWS without any of my neighbors knowing I’d done it. I guess twenty years of sysadmin experience pays off every now and then!