moving ec2 server to own server - image

Hello i have searched far and wide for a way to do this,
we are a small company that has our server hosted at amazon with an ec2 instance, we have recently bought a new server to keep at our office for testing purposes.
is there any easy way to create an image or use amazons AMI to make a complete backup/duplicate of the server? all log files and temporary files is not important i just need the system that has been developed for us to run independently on our new server.
any help is very much appreciated because we only got very little knowledge in this area ourselves but we are learning fast as well! :)
thanks in advance!

Check this article
Cloning a Linux server - use dd
http://linuxtechres.blogspot.com/2007/07/cloning-linux-server-scenery-1.html
Thanks

Related

I need some guidance and help from pros to host my new app .(please read everything)

I have been making Desktop applications for last few years. but now i have quite that job and thinking about doing working for myself. I have gone through many ideas. finally i decided to develop Online billing application . Since i am new in web application i know very little about web technologies.
I am thinking about developing that application in php or asp.net with mysql database. I don't know which one is better.(you can guide me here). I don't know whether its good idea or not.but i don't want to do job and work for myself that's for sure.
its going to be a big project so I was making budget for this whole project but i don't know what kind of hosting i will need for this app because database load will be very high because its billing application. i don't know how much it will cost me.I will give user free trial for 30 days to use application and if they like they can upgrade their accounts.
So i need your help to decide what kind of hosting will be appropriate.is this ok if i use webhosting that we use to host website which will cost me $10 to $15 a month or i will have to use cloud hosting which will cost me a lot?
I hope this link will give you idea. I want to make application like this : http://www.rapid-billing.com .
pls help me out. it might me small things for you but to me it matters a lot. Thanks
Initially, you won't have very high traffic, so using a cheap, shared server should be fine. If you outgrow it, then you must have some money coming in, so the added expense of cloud hosting will be more tolerable. There's no need to go all-in before you even get going.
That said, many cloud hosts offer some amount of hosting free, which would probably suit you just as well during initial development. An added plus of starting in the cloud is that you won't have to migrate later. Off the top of my head, Google App Engine and Heroku come to mind as well-known cloud hosts with a free tier. Microsoft Azure also provides a free 3 month trial, and I imagine they'd be a good host if you choose to go with ASP.

AWS vs Heroku vs something else for scalable platform?

Considering you're a startup with no funds for own server farm. Which existing solution can give you a peace of mind that any sudden increase in traffic won't bring everything down.
I know it's not just up to hardware, so we plan to have at least a load balancer, memcache and few db servers.
Is it possible to have a setup on AWS that would automatically add instances and bandwidth if the traffic increases?
What other advice you could give to deployment noobs? Thanks.
ps: I apologize in advance if a question is too broad or reflects inexperience on mentioned topics, but that's why I ask.
Heroku. Because you're a start-up, keep things lean and it doesn't get leaner than almost free (with 1 dyno + small shared DB). Spend time building your product, not on the infrastructure. You don't want to be installing patches when you should be talking to customers. Heroku is also flexible and allows you to scale up 'dynos' as your traffic increases so no worries about growing there. Heroku won't scale automatically for you, though, so do your own server monitoring. Heroku add-ons are also nice.
Recently we have done a very good comparison between AWS and Heroku and we decided to move to Heroku, here is the detail of this http://www.confiz.com/blog/tech-session/selecting-the-right-cloud-platform/
If you're on Python, you can try Google App Engine.
Migrating the Python app from one platform to another isn't too difficult once you get the past the learning curve as to what features is (not) available. GAE offers datastore, memcache, blobstore plus a few other goodies like dJango and Jinja (templating). Worth checking the Python start page and it didn't take me long to integrate it into Facebook and Dropbox too.
Stay away from Heroku. You can get EC2 for free for a year from Amazon. Scaling up heroku is extremely costly. Their pricing tends to be unclear and their customer service in general sucks.
BitNami for Amazon EC2 includes ready-to-run versions of Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Python, Django, Git, their required dependencies, and much more. It can be deployed via all-in-one free native installers, virtual machines and Cloud Images. maybe worth checking out.
My personal experience is that you should generally start with Heroku. Get your app out in the wild and find that product/market-fit or some type of traction. You will know you are going somewhere because customers will cause scaling issues. In this case, Heroku will allow you to scale with very little overhead. And for some time, this scaling will not hit you in the wallet.
Jump to AWS when you are ready. When will you be ready? When you have enough pain, in the wallet, where you need more control over the stack. You can hire a AWS devops type or learn about it, yourself.
Both Heroku and AWS have auto-scaling solutions, but whereas Heroku has a fairly flat learning curve -- that is what you are paying for -- AWS can get broad and steep fairly quickly. A Udemy AWS course or any of the hundred other online resources will get your started down building a robust AWS architecture.
Lastly, while performance should not be your primary concern, make sure that you are using best practices in your code. Your first user should not bring your system to a crawl. And AWS will not help if she does.
Hope this helps in some way.
This has been my experience. My saas start kits are built to deploy to Heroku out of the box for this reason. However, the start kits are also containerized. I know that you spoke of AWS explicitly, but with containers you can be infrastructure agnostic. This is worth considering!
Ted [at] https://stacksimple.io
Check out this blog series I'm starting because I found Heroku to not be scalable at all from a financial perspective compared to EC2 and Digital Ocean. Going to be showing how to put a Ruby application on Digital Ocean using Docker, which allows you the same flexibility and ability to scale up and down very quickly https://medium.com/#karimbutt/weaning-off-heroku-part-1-b7f123ae855f
It greatly depeneds whether you're looking for a PaaS, IaaS or SaaS, and what is the language you using.
AWS is a IAAS/PAAS with multiple components and layers.
Heroku is a PAAS supporting multiple languages, most notably Java, Ruby and Node.js
Other platforms come into play depending on your needs, you might want to take a look at this comparison as well: https://dictativ.com/compare/paas

FTP access on Windows Azure

Quick question. I'm currently moving a asp.net MVC web application to the Windows Azure platform. Everything is working out okay apart from one thing.
In the application at the moment, we make use of FTP accounts for each user to import large quantities of files to our database.
I understand FTP on Azure is not as straightforward.
I've googled and found this article: Ftp on Azure
This seems to be what I need except obviously we'll need to be able to add new users with their own separate FTP account. Does anyone know of an easy workaround for this?
Thanks in advance
Did you consider running a (FTP) service that's not IIS based, and you could add users programatically? Also, how are you going to solve data sync issues when the role recycles or when you upgrade it? Make sure to backup to blob on a somewhat regular basis!
Personally, I'd mount a VHD drive (Azure Drive) which is actually hosted on blob storage, and have my FTP server point to that drive. However, make sure you only have one instance of the server (problem #1) unless you don't need higher than 99,9% reliability you can solve this by running a single instance. Step 2 is I'd implement user management in relation to that program.
It's not straightforward, and I'd advise against it though. But I understand that sometimes you have to do this. I would solve it like I described above.

Newbie VPS and/or amazon ec2 question

I have a basic but serviceable web hosting plan, but it doesn't support all the Java EE functionality I want to experiment with.
I've been thinking of signing up for some kind of VPS or Amazon ec2 service so I have a machine on the web that I can tinker with; that is, having direct control to install my own servers and databases and so on.
Where's a good inexpensive place to go to get started with a simple VPS system? Or is ec2 the right place for me?
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated, thanks!
rob
Instance Types
ec2 Pricing
Console
(If you have non trivial bandwidth/storage requirements, you will have to factor those into the price equation accordingly)
Yes, you will have "direct control to install your own software"
Is this a good place to start? - yes
Is this the best/cheapest available option? - depends
Does it give you direct control over the "machine"? - yes

Where can host some server side logic without having a web site?

I'd like to host some php or perl/cgi script, without having a full blown web site, does anybody know someone is offering this kind of service, free, hopefully.
Thanks,
David
you can sign up for a developer account with Amazon Web Services and get a server instance of your choice for free for one year - http://aws.amazon.com/
You could run your own Linux or Windows webserver - both are completely capable of hosting as simple or complex a site you want. Unless you want to make this script available for others to use as a service, there's no need to find an "outside" provider.
Hmm, Free File Hosting. Or, if you don't need to actually access the files from anywhere, and you just want them hosted somewhere, gist might work well for you.

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