Nothing ventured, nothing gained

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.