This is the home page for the Bill Branan space. On this page you will find frequent updates regarding Bill Branan's activities.
09/05/08
My main focus this week was getting an EC2 image set up which properly builds, installs, and starts a Fedora server on instance startup. Most of this work was server configuration and scripting. I started by recreating the image I made last week (which provides a checkout of trunk) with some updates. I used that as my base, then added scripting to grab and update the provided install.properties file, set up the environment, update the code, install Fedora, convert the demos using the current IP, and start the Fedora server. Adding that to the server startup provided the desired results. I can now start an instance with either a configA or configB properties file, then log in and run the system tests, which pass with no further setup.
I'm considering my initial pathfinding prototype complete at this stage since I believe the capabilities of EC2 have been well enough established. There are features that are lacking, such as the ability to choose a database other than the default and have that started and configured for you, and the ability to select the JVM version to use. Based on what I've done so far, though, these things can certainly be accomplished, it's just a matter of taking the time to do it. I'd like to use the architecture meeting on Tuesday to discuss where we plan to go with AWS.
I also spent some time investigating the Amazon EBS, just doing basic setup, mounting, moving from instance to instance, etc. There's not a lot to this, really, but it's something that we will very likely use in conjunction with EC2.
