Can you provide me with references about the startup time of a virtual machine in EC2 of type m3.xlarge.
Many thanks.
This will vary depending upon the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) used to boot the Amazon EC2 instance.
For example, Windows instances supplied by AWS take longer to boot because they go through a SysPrep process that involves a reboot the first time that the instance is used.
You should measure it yourself based upon your particular use-case.
Related
Sometimes I have noted that If I don't apply updated security packages in some EC2 instances on AWS then instances run slower. I have seen it repeatedly on different machines. Is it possible that Amazon is applying some policies for machines that are not updated?
AWS has zero insight into what you run on an Amazon EC2 instance. You are responsible for installing and maintaining the operating system, applications and data. AWS is responsible for providing the platform that enables the virtual machine.
Every Amazon EC2 instance is given resources (CPU, RAM, Network) based on the Instance Type. The same instance type will always receive the same amount of resources, and the resources are not over-subscribed.
Therefore, any slowdown that you might observe would be related to the operating system and software that you are running on the instance. You can use standard monitoring tools to inspect the operating system to investigate what might be happening.
Consider I have installed a software in an Amazon EC2 machine, activated it successfully. Now I make this as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and then launch multiple instances.
How can the software identify that this is not the original machine where the product was activated?
Usually we use Hard disk, RAM and other hardware details to identify activation and then enabled the Software, but I am not sure how to proceed with Amazon images.
Each Amazon EC2 instance has an InstanceId in the form i-0c9c9b24b3583afdc.
These IDs are unique and are not reused.
For example, the cloud-init process that runs a User Data script no first boot uses this technique to determine when to run the script. It checks whether the script has run for the given Instance ID. If it has, then the script is not run again. If an AMI is made of the instance and a new instance is launched from the AMI, it notices that the Instance ID has changed and the script runs. So, it actually runs "once per Instance ID".
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.
In Amazon Web Services (or AWS) EC2; compute instances can be upgraded/downgraded when stopped. However, I'd like to know which instance types are available even when the instance is running, even if I have to stop it to do the upgrade/downgrade. So, is there an API or console interface that will tell me what instance types are available upgrade/downgrade for an instance while its running?
No. You cannot upgrade ANY instance while it is running. When upgrade your instance, it is most likely run in a different hardware. So without stopping the instance it is impossible to move our instance to a different physical machine. There is no such thing like vMotion in AWS.
I see update to the question. There is no matrix for instance upgrade. There are many factors that affect this:
Virtualization (PV or HVM)
Network (EC2 classic or EC2 VPC)
Platform (32bit or 64 bit)
Take a look at: Resizing Your Instance
I have an Amazon EC2 Micro instance running using EBS storage. This more than meets my needs 99.9% of the time, however I need to perform a very intensive database operation as a once off which kills the Micro instance.
Is there a simple way to restart the exact same instance but with lots more power for a temporary period, and then revert back to the Micro instance when I'm done? I thought this seemed more than possible under the cloud based model Amazon uses but it doesn't appear to simply be a matter of shutting down and restarting with more power as I first thought it might be.
If you are manually running the database operation, then you can just create the image of the server, launch a small or a high cpu instance using the same image, run the database operation and then create the image and launch it again as a micro instance. You can also automate this process by writing scripts using AWS APIs.
In case you're using an EBS-backed AMI you don't have to create a new image and launch it. Just stop the machine and issue a simple EC2 API command to change the instance type:
ec2-modify-instance-attribute --instance-type <instance_type> <instance_id>
Keep in mind that not all instance types work for every AMI. The applicable instance types depend on the machine itself and the kernel. You can find a list of available instance types here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/