Nothing ventured, nothing gained home notesnew archives
EC2 at Phoenix Rails User Group » 21 Feb 2008

by Marc Chung

From the part of the brain.

Recently, I spoke at the Phoenix Rails Users group about Amazon’s EC2 services.

The presentation started off with a basic introduction of EC2:

  1. Virtual computing environment,
  2. Running RedHat FC4,
  3. With a pay-as-you-grow, no long term contract payment plan

Since EC2 is a web service (SOAP), there’s no shortage of freely available tools that help you manage your EC2 instances, including:

  1. The official EC2 command-line tools
  2. The Firefox browser extension, EC2UI
  3. The amazon-ec2 RubyGem
  4. If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, the WSDL file is available too

After the introduction, I talked about some of the deployment architectures that we’ve been using, including a 1-box, 2-box, and an N-box approach. Since it was a Ruby/Rails talk, I included some notes/gotchas on various configuration files and deployment scripts.

Finally, I demoed a 2-box instance running MPICH2 and MPI Ruby, which is a set of Ruby bindings for MPI.

Derek Neighbors posted a recap of the event.

Chris Matthieu recorded the presentation over at Rubyology

Here are the slides to follow along.

Thanks to IntegrumTech for hosting the event.

Want to know more?

I'm Marc Chung, and you're reading Nothing ventured, Nothing gained, a blog about building beautiful software. I'm the CTO and Founder of OpenRain, a web services and product shop out of Phoenix, AZ, where I make millions of users happy by building breathtaking software with brilliant people.