So at work we run a bunch of sites on rackspaces cloud sites platform. This works alright, except I have no way of tweaking anything server side and I find that they sometimes aren't as responsive as they could be.
Let's assume that most of the sites are bloated wordpress installations.
Would it be possible to use EC2 micro instances to host these? (One instance per site)?
I want to move away from rackspace as I have no flexibility with cloud sites and prefer Amazons services.
Sure! You can easily do that!
Sign up for EC2 here.
Go to http://alestic.com/ and chose AMI (Ubuntu AMIs for EC2 drop-down) you want to start instance from.
Start EC2 Micro Instance by hitting the links (or use API Tools). You can use user-data to install desired software on instance start, but I recommend (for simplicity) just to start Instance and install software via terminal using SSH. Follow the dialog and create RSA key to connect your Instance.
Connect to your Instance over ssh using RSA key.
Install software. For example: sudo su, then apt-get update && apt-get install -y ntp php5-fpm nginx wordpress [...].
Create AMI from running Instance with installed and configured software.
Launch more Instances from your own AMI bundled with Wordpress and stuff!
Full disclosure: I am a rackspace employee.
If you want more flexibility than rackspace cloud sites, then you can use rackspace cloud server. You will have all the flexibility of the cloud. If you like the managed part of cloud sites, then i would suggest managed cloud server.
Related
I need to deploy my Java application to AWS EC2 Instance using terraform. The catch here, we should not use *.pem file to deploy the application.
I try to create ELB and associate instances using terraform.I can able to deploy the application using ssh and pem file to ec2 instances Private IPs. But we shouldn't use *.pem or *.ppk file, as it'll not be allowed in production servers.
I tried using chef with terraform , but that also requires *.pem to connect to AWS Instances.
Please let me know the detailed steps/suggestions of how to deploy the application using terraform without using pem file.
If you can't make any changes to your instance after creating it (including deploying the application) then you will need to bake any and all changes into the AMI that Terraform deploys.
You might want to look into using Packer to create AMIs with your intended configuration and then use Terraform to deploy these AMIs.
For reference, this strategy is known as "immutable infrastructure" so you might want to do some further reading into this area.
If instead it's simply that SSH connectivity is not allowed and you can make changes over other ports then you should be able to use an AMI that has a Chef client, Puppet agent or Salt minion on it (there may well be other tools that work over a non SSH protocol/port but this restriction rules out Ansible) and then use any of those tools to continue to configure your instance. Obviously you could find a suitable AMI from the AMI marketplace or, once again, use Packer to set up the relevant configuration management client.
I was reading through Rackspace's article about using Vagrant with Rackspace open cloud which shows you how you can use a vagrant vm that is hosted on a Rackspace server.
I'm wondering if there's any way that I could work from a vm that is provisioned like a Rackspace server on my local machine via Vagrant. I can't seem to find a box specifically for emulating Rackspace servers and I can't find information on what base OS and basic tools rackspace cloud servers actually use so I could provision my own environment.
Is there a place where I can find a rackspace specific vagrant box or at least find out the os info?
Edit:
Correction, it is possible, but it takes a few steps:
Export (from Rackspace) the image that you want to run locally see here for more info
Download image from Cloud Files
Convert/import the vhd file into VirtualBox see this for example
At this point, you should be able to use that image with Vagrant to run a Rackspace image locally.
I need to setup a web server and a database server on EC2.
It should be easy to migrate to another service provider later.
Currently, I have a web server and a database server, each running on separate EC2 micro instances with software installed there remotely.
Can we run a vagrant box on these micro instances with pre-installed and pre-configured softwares like LAMP stack and use that instead. So I will end with 2 vagrant boxes , one for web server another for database server.
Amazon provides already means to copy an instance but it is copied to another EC2 instance only probably .. If there is need to move to some other provider, it will be same process of re-installing all. So, an own virtual box installed on Amazon's virtual box is what i was looking into..
I don't know how good or bad it is.. I doubt if this will affect performance as well. Please share your views. Target is to have env prepared locally and have flexibility to deploy it on any service provider easily.
Running vagrant inside your AWS box is probably not the right solution. Have you looked into the Vagrant AWS provider?
That will allow you to setup and provision your AWS boxes with Vagrant and Puppet or Chef... if you are using Puppet or Chef to provision your servers then you will have a very portable "scripted" install for your servers that can easily be moved to another provider at a later date...
So running a virtual machine, on another virtual machine probably isn't the best. But if you want to install Vagrant on Amazon Linux you can do:
wget https://releases.hashicorp.com/vagrant/2.2.4/vagrant_2.2.4_x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh vagrant_2.2.4_x86_64.rpm
The RPM is the Centos version from the downloads page here: https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html
But then you cannot install virtualbox to run a VM. So it doesn't actually work anyways.
Today is my second day of trying to use amazon and i have started to pull my hairs. I want to set up ftp with amazon. I have signed up with them and and created an instance with amazon EC2. I have downloaded the key and I am able to login with ssh using the through Terminal in my mac. I can create files in the instance through terminal.
The instance is something like following:
Public DNS: ec2-xx-xx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com
I have created a index.html file at this location via terminal. But I am not able to view it in the browser using following url:
ec2-xx-xx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com/index.html
I just want to create web services here which I will be using in iPhone.
Also I am not sure how to go forward. How will I get to my local files and upload them to server. In other ftps I could do it using lcd, get, put etc but these commands are not working here. can some one please help me how should I go ahead because at this moment I am just banging my head to wall. Someone please help me.
Thanks
Pankaj
Use scp to copy files over ssh:
scp -i key-pair-file file-to-upload ec2-user#instance-public-DNS:
Notice the colon at the end!
With plain EC2 instances, you also need to install some sort of Web server software to power your Web service, and open the HTTP port in the firewall.
Just in case you plan to write your Web service in Java, I have put together a series of articles (Part I, Part II, Part III) guiding through the basics of installing Apache Tomcat on an Amazon Linux EC2 instance.
EDIT 2014/11/20
Dmitry Leskov is actually the better one. You should use his approach.
Answer from 2012
You first have to setup a LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP) stack on your EC2 instance to run any kind of web service.
This means you have to go trough the following steps:
Create an EC2 instance
Setup EBS Storage for mySQL data
Install mySQL
Configure mySQL
Install Apache
Configure Apache
Install PHP
Configure PHP
If you need a detailed instruction, I'd recommend you to take a look at this: Building EC2 with LAMP.
To transfer files to your EC2 instance you can use any FTP client, which supports SFTP and key pairs (you can also enable PasswordAuthentication for SSH to login with credentials). I'm using Transmit with no problems.
On a related note, I encountered a strange problem where I could not FTP from a PHP script running under apache - but I could if I ran the PHP script as root from the command line. After a day of googling, I found this, which solved the problem.
Disable SELinux. (Security Enhanced Linux)
The temporary solution is:
echo 0 >/selinux/enforce
..which will prove the concept, but will not survive a reboot. There are plenty of resources out there that describe how to permanently disable SELinux.
Can you install and run your own windows services on ec2? Does it have MSMQ?
Yes, you can. You can also install MSMQ, and I can confirm that it works perfectly.
First you need to create an EBS volume, using a snapshot of the appropriate Windows installation media:
Install windows services on EC2 http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/9644/aws.png
Then simply attach the EBS volume to your Windows instance. At this stage, you would be able to install any Windows service, such as MSMQ and IIS, that did not come pre-installed with the original AMI.
You could also take advantage of Amazon Simple Queue Service. It's exposed as a webservice so you could easily communicate with it from your Windows Service or virtually any other platform/technology.
Yes, you can install any software that you like.
I don't know for sure if MSMQ is available or not. If you don't get a specific answer here you could post on the AWS forums, or if you have an account, fire up an instance and test it out (e.g. using this AMI).