One of the appeals of cloud computing is the idea of using what you need when you need. One of the ways that Amazon provides for this is through autoscaling. In essence, this allows you to vary the number of (related) running instances according to some metric that is being tracked. In this article, we… Continue reading Autoscaling with custom metrics
Tag: EC2
Building Ice Cream Sandwich (Android v4) for VirtualBox on EC2
This was completed 2 weeks ago, but I am only now getting around to posting it online. This experiment was purely for the fun of it – I don’t own (or want) a cell phone, and have never used Android. However, it is an interesting operating system, and I always enjoy playing around with such… Continue reading Building Ice Cream Sandwich (Android v4) for VirtualBox on EC2
Adding Swap Space to an EC2 Instance
The t1.micro instance comes with only 602MB of memory. Especially under high load, it is quite easy to deplete the available memory – and since no swap space is enabled by default, this can quickly lead to a server becoming unresponsive. Swap space can also allow the kernel to move unused data out of memory,… Continue reading Adding Swap Space to an EC2 Instance
Installing Heartbeat on Amazon’s EC2
I am currently working on setting up a small high availability server cluster on Amazon’s EC2 cloud. Such a setup requires several underlying technologies to work together. Common among these are a distributed file system, a load balancer, and some form of monitoring and resource control. This article looks at the one aspect of ‘monitoring’… Continue reading Installing Heartbeat on Amazon’s EC2
ec2-consistent-snapshot on Amazon’s Linux AMI
Update: the complementary article to this one, on Rotating EBS snapshots has now been posted. After the recent failure of EBS volumes on Amazon’s cloud, backup is quite likely something to be considering. If, during the aforementioned incident, recent snapshots of the affected EBS volumes were available, it might have been possible to relaunch instances… Continue reading ec2-consistent-snapshot on Amazon’s Linux AMI
AWS Instances with EBS Root Volumes
While instances backed with EBS-root volumes do cost a bit more than the equivalent instance-store images (there is a cost for I/O), they have certain advantages – persistence and ease of replacement being notable. This article will focus on the latter. As a quick side note before proceeding, it is possible to add ephemeral storage… Continue reading AWS Instances with EBS Root Volumes
Setting up nginx as a Reverse Proxy
Procedure for setting up nginx as a reverse proxy on Amazon’s Linux distribution, with Apache running in the background. …Read the Rest
Setting up a RAID on EC2
At home, I have my operating system drive setup in RAID 0 (striped). The advantage of this, of course, is that read and write speed is appreciably increased (my benchmarks show the array to be about 1.7x as fast as either drive on its own (mind you, I am using older drives, and they are not quite… Continue reading Setting up a RAID on EC2