I have a website that I am trying to have the web form connect to a MySQL database running on Amazon's RDS to post and retrieve information. I'm an absolute beginner with code but have managed to get myself this far (creative3c.org). I've had coworkers and friends offer some help, but their knowledge doesn't extend to everything I was told I would need (AWS API Gateway, Lambda--anything else?).
I've been pulling my hair out for a week looking through tutorials, articles, and step-by-step guides but so many presume extensive knowledge on the viewer or they all talk about what I don't need (like phpmyadmin--and php won't work for S3 or Lambda).
Am I jumping too far into the really complex stuff? The person that told me to go the AWS route is certified and brilliant with code--but unfortunately they are fickle, busy, and aren't a good teacher to distill their knowledge. I don't know if I should have gone with something simpler. If you view the website, you'll probably understand how basic it is.
I'm stuck and really stressed about finishing this website and appreciate the help to get me in the right direction! I feel I'm so close! I'm really good at scaling up from a small example of exactly what I need--I just need that initial example!
I'm pleased to hear that you've learnt so quickly. All the terminology floating around can be very confusing. Just remember: AWS is just the platform you deploy to. It can be as simple and complicated as you want it to be
I'm not an AWS expert but here's my birdseye view
You could build an entire running website on your laptop then simply deploy that wholesale to a LAMP server that you've created up in AWS. Now you have a web application running in AWS, without using any of the AWS jargon (beanstalks, lambdas...)
Thats when you would follow this link to provision your server: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/install-LAMP.html
Or you could put the database piece of your application into RDS (a database on the cloud) then put the web application piece in a seperate web server then configure those two servers to talk to each other.
You have a web site but it's now running on two seperate machines
Or (I'm a bit hazy on this) for the web app you could instead deploy bits of your web code to lambda and stick them all together
In all cases you can apply 'elastic beanstalk' to automatically grow and shrink the computers running your site.
Like I said it can be as simple and complicated as you want it to be - and you don't need it to be complicated so the BlueHost option is fine.
Related
This is my first attempt at looking into cloud hosting and I'm feeling like a complete idiot. I have always had my own dedicated server with which I would would remote in and install/manage everything myself. So this cloud thing is completely new for me. I just can't seem to grasp basic things... like how I would get Tomcat and PostgreSQL installed in a way that they could talk to each other or get my domain and SSL cert on there, etc.
If I could just get a feel for where I should start, then I could probably calculate my costs and jump into the free trial where hopefully things will click for me.
Here are my basic, high-level requirements...
My web app running in Tomcat over HTTPS
Let's say approximately 1,000 page views per day
PostgreSQL supporting my web app.
Let's say approximately 10GB database storage
Throughout the day, a fairly steady stream of inbound SFTP data (~ 100MB per day)
The processing load on the app server side should be fairly light. The heaving lifting will be on the DB side sorting through and processing lots of data.
I'm having trouble figuring out which options I would install and calculating costs. If someone could help me get started by saying something like "You would start with a std-xyz-med server, install ABC located here at http://blahblah, then install XYZ located at http://XYZ.... etc.. etc. You can expect to pay somewhere around $100-$200 per month"....
Thoughts?
I would be eternally grateful. It seems like they should have some free sales support channel to ask someone at Google about this, but I don't see it.
Thank You!
I'll try to give you some tips where to start looking.
I will be referring to some products, here are the links
If you want to stick to your old ways, you can always spin up an instance on Compute Engine and set it up the same way you did before, these are just regular virtual machines. For some use cases this is completely valid.
You can split different components of your stack to different products:
For example, if your app is fine with postgresql, you can spin up a fully managed service in Cloud SQL, which might make it easier to manage backup or have several apps access the same db.
Alternatively, have a look at the different DB offerings to see if any of them matches your needed workload better. Perhaps have a look at BigQuery?
If you want to turn your app into a microservice, which is then easier to autoscale and is more fault tolerant, have a look at App Engine. That way you don't need to manage a virtual machine. The docs here will lead you through some easy to follow examples on how to set up SSL.
For the services to talk to each other, refer to docs of the individual components. It's usually very simple.
With pricing, try https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/
Things like BigQuery have different pricing models - you don't pay for server uptime, but for amounts of data stored & processed with your queries.
I've been a mobile developer for a few years, and Im looking to expand to cloud integration with my apps. Im looking into AWS solutions to fill this need. I don't know a ton about servers or cloud capabilities, so I'm trying to get pointed in the right direction, and maybe be introduced to some good resources.
My goal is to be able to upload some images to AWS and manipulate these images in the cloud. I'm sure that I'll need S3 to store my images, but is an EC2 instance the correct thing to use to perform the manipulation? This is where my lack of knowledge of servers is holding me back.
I think that the best answer I could get would be a comment on whether my needs from AWS are what I listed above, and a point in the right direction towards articles to tutorials of how to get things up and running.
Thanks much for the help!
What I ended up doing was using AWS Lambda to accomplish what I needed. Running a node.js based lambda function with ffmpeg-like manipulation on the images/media that I was uploading worked out quite well.
Side note :: The processing that I was doing was fairly lightweight, so it worked well with lambda. If things scale up any further I might consider switching the processing to an EC2 instance.
Right now the website is running locally and I'm still working on it.
While doing this I also have to make it visible to a specific group of users as I need their feedback in order to add/change features, etc.
I've tried to find a free web hosting without any luck (see dependencies).
I was thinking to create a VPN but then I will have to use my PC as a host for a virtual machine which is by far not what I'm looking for.
Therefore, my questions are:
1. Which is the best way to achieve this (website visibility for TESTING) fast and easy?
2. If a dedicated web host is the best solution, please point me to an easy-to-use and cheap one. What I've tried so far: elastichosts, alwasydata, stackable, 1FreeHosting and probably others I don't remember right now. For a reason or another I couldn't use none of the above.
Another aspect to be considered: I want this only for simple testing and I don't need a lot of server resources. Also the traffic will be very low as there are only 5 testers. That's why I wouldn't pay too much for it. I will probably need this temporary web hosting for 2-3 months.
Dependencies:
- as the website uses mezzanine, for the moment I only need mezzanine's dependencies.
Thanks in advance!
You can always just setup port forwarding on your router. This would allow your testers direct access to your app. Though this might give your PC more exposure than you want.
Heroku has a free tier.
In your non free options, an instance at linode costs $20/month, but requires some setup. Rackspace has similar options in their cloud servers line. Both are no contract servers.
My blogpost covers gracefully deploying a Mezzanine site. The monthly hosting cost is nothing compared to the cost of a slow, painful deployment process.
An EC2 micro-instance right now costs as little as ~US$3.50/month. I create and destroy staging servers on EC2 servers for testing and sharing with others.
I wondered if anyone can point me in the right direction in regards to installing Railo on AWS.
In my spare time I've put together a website to sell illustrations, but due to cost I'm unable to keep on spending money hosting it on a dedicate CF server with almost zero budget for marketing. I've been toying with the idea of setting up an account with Amazon and installing Railo.
Over the past few months I've had different advice, such as get a S3 account to host the images and an EC2 account for Railo for the website and DB with SSL, or just have S3 account where I will be able to host Railo and have my images on the same server. I'm not sure what is best and I was wondering if you can advise what you think a good solution would be.
I've read a few blogs some with good details on setups but they seem to be over a year+ old, so I'm not sure if they are valid solution any more. It's very much over my head, as I'm a developer, but I'm very eager to learn new things especially about the cloud service as it's not a common area to get involved in when working for companies. In the past I used to tag a long to server rooms and understand the infrastructure but now everything is done remotely and it's not so easy to get involved.
Any basic advice/advanced advice from your experiences of what I should follow and if you know of any good resources would be very much appreciated.
Should I get an S3 and EC2 AWS setup or will one of them do (will need DB connectivity)?
Load balancing two EC2 instances will that be hard to configure, I will need to web servers.
I just posted this very topic a few weeks ago. Should still be more than up to date:
http://blog.nictunney.com/2012/03/railo-tomcat-and-apache-on-amazon-ec2.html
HTH
is there someone who has expirience in hosting django applications on ep.io?
Waht are the pros/cons on it?
I'm currently using ep.io, I'm still in development with my app but I have an app deployed and running.
When you use a service like this you go into it knowing that it isn't going to be the perfect solution for every case. Knowing the pros and cons before hand will help set your expectations so that you aren't disappointed later on.
ep.io is still very young and I believe still in beta, and isn't available to the general public. To be totally fair to them, it is still a work in progress and some of these pros and cons may change as they roll out new features. I will try and come back and update this post as the new versions become available, and my experience with the service continues.
So far I am really pleased with what they have, they took the most annoying part of developing an application and made it better. If you have a simple blog app, it should be a breeze to deploy it, and probably not cost that much to host.
Pros:
Server Management: You don't have to worry about your server setup at all, it handles everything for you. With a VPS, you would need to worry about making sure the server is up to date with security patches, and all that fun stuff, with this, you don't worry about anything, they take care of all that for you.
deployment: It makes deploying an app and having it up and running really quickly. deploying a new version of an app is a piece of cake, I just need to run one maybe two commands, and it handles everything for me.
Pricing: you are only charged for what you use, so if you have a very low traffic website, it might not cost you anything at all.
Scaling: They handle scaling and load balancing for you out of the box, no need for you to worry about that. You still need to write your application so that it can scale efficiently, but if you do, they will handle the rest.
Background tasks: They have support for cronjobs as well as background workers using celery.
Customer support: I had a few questions, sent them an email, and had an answer really fast, they have been great, so much better then I would have expected. If you run your own VPS, you really don't have anyone to talk to, so this is a major plus.
Cons:
DB access: You don't have direct access to the database, you can get to the psql shell, but you can't connect an external client gui. This makes doing somethings a little more difficult or slow. But you can still use the django admin or fixtures to do a lot of things.
Limited services available: It currently only supports Postgresql and redis, so if you want to use MySQL, memcached, mongodb,etc you are out of luck.
low level c libs: You can't install any dependencies that you want, similar to google app engine, they have some of the common c libs installed already, and if you want something different that isn't already installed you will need to contact them to get it added. http://www.ep.io/docs/runtime/#python-libraries
email: You can't send or recieve email, which means you will need to depend on a 3rd party for that, which is probably good practice anyway, but it just means more money.
file system: You have a more limited file system available to you, and because of the distributed nature of the system you will need to be very careful when working from files. You can't (unless i missed it) connect to your account via (s)ftp to upload files, you will need to connect via the ep.io command line tool and either do an rsync or a push of a repo to get files up there.
Update: for more info see my blog post on my experiences with ep.io : http://kencochrane.net/blog/2011/04/my-experiences-with-epio/
Update: Epio closed down on May 31st 2012