What is AWS EC2 Bundle Tasks?
Could any one please help me to understand what it is?
And any one help in showing a sample demo of it by steps or screenshot?
In the old days, before Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon EC2 instances were booted from Instance Store.
Instance Store is a disk that is directly connected to the host computer, which means that when an instance is turned off, the contents of the disk is lost (because the disk will be assigned to the next user who uses a Virtual Machine on that host).
This also meant that instances could not be stopped and started again, because the boot disk is lost.
These days, Amazon EBS provides network-attached storage, which persists even when an instance is stopped (and, if desired, even after an instance is terminated).
According to this article, Bundle Tasks is/was a process designed to get a Windows instance ready for booting from Instance Store:
See: Bundle Tasks in Amazon | Zeeshan Ali Shah's Blog
There is little reason to use this process these days.
Related
According to the AWS documentation "any data stored in the RAM of the host computer or the instance store volumes of the host computer is gone." Does this mean that the web application I installed on my EC2 instance will be deleted if I stop running my instance?
I apologize for the naive question. I am new to this and worried I might make a mistake.
An Amazon EC2 instance is just like a normal computer. If you turn it off, anything in RAM is lost. Also, if you reboot either computer, the contents of RAM is lost (well, more like 'forgotten', but effectively the same).
Just like your home computer, if you reboot or stop/start an EC2 instance, it boots up again. Whatever software you have installed on the computer is still there. However, applications you were running will only start if you have configured a startup script to run the app again.
Typically, when software such as a web server is installed on a computer, it is configured to automatically start again when the computer is turned on/rebooted in future.
Elastic Block Store (EBS) disk volumes act just like a disk in a normal computer. If an EC2 instance is stopped and later started again, the contents of the disk is still there, unchanged.
Bottom line: It's just like a home computer. Don't panic.
Adding to John's answer, as long as you do not use an Instance Store volume, to store your web application, you are good to go.
The data in an instance store persists only during the lifetime of its
associated instance. If an instance reboots (intentionally or
unintentionally), data in the instance store persists. However, data
in the instance store is lost under the following circumstances:
The underlying disk drive fails
The instance stops
The instance terminates
If however you are using an EBS volume, these conditions do not apply and you are free to start and stop your instance any number of times you want.
Yes unless you have EBS volume attached to EC2. If you are using an EBS-backed instance, you can stop and restart that instance without affecting the data stored in the attached volume
Last day I wanted, according to AWS recommendations, put my ec2 instance inside of an autoscaling group. I created my ec2 instance by using the standard linux AMI instance and then I installed a full LAMP server.
The next morning I tried accessing my apache and guess what? My LAMP wasn't there anymore! Everything was wiped away.
I guess this is because, for some reason, the autoscaling group deleted my instance and recreated it vanilla.
Now I still want to autoscale my instance but, of course, I want to keep my LAMP and the stored data.
So here's my questions:
How to create a customized image starting from my actual instance?
Would it be correct to create the mysql DB using AWS RDS so to not keep it linked to my instance?Is it more or less expensive than dedicating a EBS storage?
I also want to keep my /var/www/html data somewhere shared between instances: while it is true that, on production, I won't update those files often it is also true that I don't want to lose them just because the autoscaling resets my instance state. I also don't want to re-create an image each time I update said files... What's the best way?Maybe an s3 bucket? Or, still, an EBS storage shared between instances?
I would assume that the reason that your "LAMP [server] wasn't there anymore" was because the web server failed health checks and was terminated and replaced by AutoScaling.
Elastic Beanstalk would be a good way to manage some of the complexity here. If that's not an option then you should read up on AutoScaling, ALB, and health checks.
In response to your specific questions:
you can create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from an instance. When you, or AutoScaling, launch a new instance from that AMI, you can get the instance up to date by running a script in userdata
move the DB from the web/app server to RDS, or to a DB server that you manage yourself
maintain the html/js/css etc. in S3 and sync them to your web server periodically (there are other options, but that's simple)
We have created an instance (m4.large) where we installed Windows Server 2012 r2. It is currently used as a terminal server for SAP business one software with license Remote Desktop Service per device (CAL). We made a mistake in choosing the instance type for it is recommended to use m4.xlarge for terminal servers. We would like to upgrade our instance type to resolve memory requirement issue.
We are new to AWS and would like to seek advise on what would be our best approach. Is it safe to directly upgrade the instance? We have no concerns of downtime for now.
We are also considering in making a snapshot first then launch it on an new and upgraded instance. We would like to ask if RDS licenses will also be migrated?
Thanks you for your kind replies.
You can change instance type anytime, but the instance must be stopped. If you are not concerned with some minutes of downtime just stop the instance, change the instance type and start the instance. Taking a snapshot as a backup before and frequently is a good precaution.
This change will have no impact on RDS, as that is a separate service.
One way would be simply to stop instance and upgrade it.
Warning
When you stop an instance, the data on any instance store volumes is
erased. Therefore, if you have any data on instance store volumes that
you want to keep, be sure to back it up to persistent storage.
Any Amazon EBS volumes remain attached to the instance, and their data
persists.
Any data stored in the RAM of the host computer or the instance store
volumes of the host computer is gone.
Another Way if you want minimal Downtime is you can create an AMI of it and Spin up new instance with Instance type and size what ever you desire and assign the domain or Elastic IP of current instance to new one and terminate old instance.
Also Regarding The RDS Licensing Please Mention what you mean by upgrading , but there will an outage when you apply for instance upgrade or License is Modified.
Also Upgrading EC2 Instance has no affect on Existing RDS as both are different services.
For Reference on Ms SQL DB , Please read these AWS Documentation:
Modifying a DB Instance Running the Microsoft SQL Server Database Engine
Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon RDS
As m4.large is EBS backed instance. so the loss of data is not a concern in the above question. Just select->right click-> stop the instance and change the instance type to m4.xlarge by right click->instance settings->instance type.
Also for your second question RDS is a separate service, so it won't get affected.
I am trying to wrap my head around EC2 instances, and I am having a bit of an issue. I heard from a friend of mine that Amazon will kill EC2 instances, and then they restart the image (thus losing all state). Unless it uses EBS as a backing store, you get no persistence.
But I have been looking into Xen and it seems like instances should easily migrate instead of being killed/restarted.
So, do Amazon EC2 instances randomly stop/start an image with all state being managed by something external like EBS?
Amazon EC2 instances will not be stopped/started/restarted unless you issue a command to do so.
In some situations (eg hardware maintenance), you might receive a request from Amazon asking you to stop & start your instance (which moves it to a different host). Such requests are typically issued with two weeks notice.
One AWS customer told me that their instance had been running continuously for over three years.
Yes it is quite possible that an EC2 instance dies and is replaced. Depending upon your data, you may need to use EBS, EFS or S3 to prevent data loss in such cases.
I currently have a t1.micro (free) instance running in aws, with Windows 2008 R2. I was taking a trial, getting a grasp of how to work with amazon aws service with this instance.
Now, I want to migrate it to a higher config instance say m1.large.
While I was trying to create AMI of the instance, it said that the instance is going to be rebooted, What data will I loose if the instance is rebooted ? Will the applications installed (MySql, Crystal Reports and some other apps) be deleted ?
How to migrate it without loosing any data.
Thanks
If you have a standard t1.micro with a 8 GB root volume, nothing should be lost. You would only loose data if you use Instance Storage, but you are probably not using it, unless you added it yourself.
If you really don't want to take any risk, you can select the "No Reboot" option when creating an AMI. Then try launching a new, larger instance from that AMI (while leaving the other instance running) and see for yourself.