For some time I am managing EC2 (Windows Boxes), RDS and S3 on AWS.
I do know manual steps that must be made in order to set up lets say a normal box (DB, Storage and Server. I heard about Vagrand, but everywhere I looked it mainly talks about Linux boxes on AWS.
My main question is: Is Vagrand a tool that will save me time for deyploment (windows), or should I not use it at all (in Windows scenario).
Vagrant plays nicely with AWS (via vagrant-aws plugin).
Vagrant seems to play nicely with Windows as well since version 1.6 and the introduction of WinRM support (ssh alternative for Windows).
However AWS plugin doesn't support WinRM communicator yet. So you'll need to pre-bake your Windows AMIs with SSH service pre installed, if you want vagrant to provision it.
Update (29/03/2016): Thanks to Rafael Goodman for pointing to vagrant-aws-winrm plugin as a possible workaround.
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AWS App2Container (A2C) is a recently launched feature by AWS. It is a CLI tool to help you lift and shift applications that run in your on-premises data centres or on virtual machines so that they run in containers that are managed by Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS. Since there is not much info on the internet about this, apart from the AWS document so does anybody knows how to implement it and what are the dependencies required for it?
This is a fairly new service so most people will be relying on reading at the moment.
For JAVA applications the setup instructions on Linux indicate that you just download the app2container package and then run the following over your code
sudo app2container containerize --application-id java-app-id
For .NET applications the setup instructions on Windows indicate that it is exactly the same process, run the install file and that will have all dependencies.
The best way to try and implement this will be by following these tutorials step by step. Also remember at this time it is JAVA or .NET only.
Is there anyway I can get to know what are all the windows OS support available in Azure when compared with AWS.
I wanted to create VM in azure with win7, win8 and win10 OS versions is it possible?
And also creating EC2 with same OS's is possible?
Here is the list for AWS:
https://aws.amazon.com/windows/resources/amis/
And the I think this is right for Azure:
https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps?filters=virtual-machine-images%3Bwindows%3Bmicrosoft&page=1
There are obviously going to be custom ones that other people create and put into AWS marketplace, but by looks of it these are all the generic ones.
I need to launch solaris os in aws-ec2,
1) Do aws provide solaris ami?
My analysis-i searched but not found anywhere in aws marketplace.
2) can i create vm of solaris in local and than export to aws-ec2 using AWS VM import-export?
According to this link, no. Looks like they stopped supporting it back in 2011.
Ten years ago EC2 only supported Linux natively. AWS supplied the kernel, and the kernel was Linux 2.6.16 at that point in time. Right now AWS support other operating systems. Some users have had a lot of success running other OS's (e.g. Windows, but Solaris should also work) on top of the native Linux instances we provide, using emulation software like QEMU. For example see Enomaly (www.anomaly.net), and various postings resources on this Amazon Web Services site, e.g.
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=47267
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=592&categoryID=101
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry!default.jspa?categoryID=100&externalID=507&fromSearchPage=true
Via Amazon.com
I'm currently working with a team in my University to put together a new webapp. Nothing too fancy, just run of the mill MySQL + Django. We are also hoping to use Git for source control. We were wondering what hosting options were available to us. We're all very competent with Unix, so a ssh connection would be preferable. We also looked into the Amazon Cloud, but are not sure if that's right for us. What does Stackoverflow suggest for a provider to host both a Git repo for us and our webapp. The simpler, the better. It should also run a Linux environment.
I have had great success using the Rackspace Cloud servers. You get root SSH into the server, so you can set up your Git repo and your web app there. They have a lot of options for which flavor of Linux you want to use as well.
I'm doing Django/Postgres on an Ubuntu server and haven't had any problems at all. As a bonus, it includes very easy web and API integration with their CDN if you're interested in that.
I looked into a variety of cloud providers and RS had the best options for me, although CDN integration was a big deal for my site so that factor weighed heavier than it might for you.
I use the cheapo 256MB RAM/10GB HD install and pay around ~$12/month after bandwidth costs are figured into it.
Here's the pricing: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing/
Why not AWS? It has a free tier that is able to run basic Django apps well. You can run it using a Django AMI directly or a service like BitNami Cloud Hosting (Disclaimer: I am a BitNami developer, I am actually in charge of many of the Python-based stacks). Both options allow you to run a micro instance of an Amazon Machine for free (680Mb Ram, 10Gb disk).
On BitNami Cloud Hosting, we recently added support for Python and Django (Python 2.6.5 and Django 1.3) and we already included Git. When you select to create a new server you will have access to all those components on top of Ubuntu 10.04.
Also if you are interested in using Redmine (as dgel suggests) you can select to install it when you create your server in the same machine. Since it is an university project, you may also want to consider hosting the Git part on github.com for free.
I would highly recommend sourcerepo.com for git and redmine hosting. $6.95 per month for unlimited projects including redmine instances with git hooks. You don't need to worry about setting up or maintaining the git repos or redmine instances yourself.
Then for your project's public hosting you can't beat linode.com for $19.95 per month.
We have the need to perform tests on localized platforms that put some burden on our hardware resources because for just a few weeks we might need plenty of servers and clients (Windows 2003 and Windows 2008, Vista, XP, Red Hat, etc) in multiple languages.
We typically have relied on blades with Windows 2003 and VMWare, but sometimes these are overgrown by punctual needs and also have the issue that the acquisition and deployment process is quite slow if the environment needs to grow.
Is Amazon EC2/S3 usable in the following scenario?
Install VMWare (Desktop because we need the ability to have snapshots) on an Amazon AMI.
Load existing VMWare images from S3 and run them on EC2 instances (perhaps 3 or 4 server or client OSes on each EC2 instance.
We are more interested in the ability to very easily start or stop VMware snaphsots for relatively short tests. This is just for testing configurations, not a production environment to actually serve a user workload. The only real user is the tester. These configurations might be required for just a few weeks and then turned off for a few months until the next release requires them again.
Is EC2/S3 a viable alternative for this type of testing purpose?
Do you actually need VMWare, or are you testing software that runs in the VMWare VMs? You might actually need VMWare if you are testing e.g. VMWare deployment policy, or are running code that tests the VMWare APIs. Examples of the latter might be you are testing an application server stack and currently using VMWare to test on many platforms.
If you actually need VMWare, I do not believe that you can install VMWare in EC2. Someone will correct & enlighten me if this is not the case.
If you don't actually need VMWare, you have more options. If you can use one of the zillion public AMIs as a baseline, clone the appropriate AMIs and customize them to suit your needs (save the customized version as a private AMI for your team). Then, you can use as many of them as you like. Perhaps you already have a bunch of VMWare images that you need to use in your testing. In that case, you can migrate your VMWare image to an EC2 AMI as described in various places in Google, for example:
http://thewebfellas.com/blog/2008/9/1/creating-an-new-ec2-ami-from-within-vmware-or-from-vmdk-files
(Apologies to the SO censors for not pasting the entire article here. It's pretty long.) But that's a shortcut; you can always use the documented AMI creation process to convert any machine (VMWare or not) to an AMI. Perform that process for each VMWare VM you have, and you'll be all set. Just keep in mind that when you create an AMI, you have to upload it to S3, and that will take a lot of time for large VMs.
This is a bit of a shameless plug, but we have a new startup that may deal with exactly your problem. Amazon EC2 is excellent for on-demand computing, but is really targeted at just a single user launching production servers. We've extended EC2 to make it a Virtual Lab Management environment, with self-service, policies and VM sharing. You can check it out at http://LabSlice.com and see if it meets your needs.
Amazon provides a solution themselves now: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/12/amazon-vm-import-bring-your-vmware-images-to-the-cloud.html