Amazon EC2 test drive
I just tried out Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service for the first time today. Its been around for a while and a lot of tech startups have leveraged cloud-based services such as EC2, S3 and others from Amazon to scale up quickly and cheaply.
So far, my experience with EC2 has been quite good. I am evaluating it for a couple of projects I am working on. I love the fact that they recently added (beta) support for Windows server. Sometimes, some client may ask for a .NET-based application and now I have the perfect place to deploy such an app.
What you need to get started
- Create an Amazon AWS account
- Sign up for EC2
- Get your AWS access keys
- Install Elasticfox plugin for Firefox
- Install PuTTy
- Download the Elasticfox tutorial
That’s pretty much it. I followed the instructions from the tutorial and everything worked as expected. However, there was one caveat. I had to install the full PuTTy distribution on my Windows system otherwise stuff like the key pair generation and SSH access would not work at all and Elasticfox would not give you any indication as to why not. This little factoid was not mentioned in the tutorial.
I was able to get a Windows server instance up and running in about 15 minutes or so. Thanks Amazon!