OK, I am an Amazon fanboy. I just took a look into the AWS Management Console (beta). It makes launching a machine image (AMI) incredibly simple. It had been nearly two years (could that be right?) since I dove into EC2 and instantiated an instance of my own. Back then only LAMP stacks were supported. This time I took a crack at a Windows instance. It was beautiful. In about 10 minutes I was remotely logged into a very familiar looking Windows virtual server that was running SQLServer and IIS.
Granted I’ve heard a few complaints about running windows in Amazon’s cloud e.g. the lack of ‘standard’ security & being unable to download installs, not having access to the i386 folder for install of new modules etc. I’ll be diving into some of those for a project I have in mind. Until then this is a great way for me to rent SQLServer by the hour and the Management Console saves me from remember all the command line (uuh) commands.
There is some chatter today about Amazon stepping on the toes of it’s partners that have developed similar tools. Are you kidding me? Did anybody really expect Amazon to keep a command line interface??
Tags: amazon, Amazon Web Services, ami, virtual server
[...] there in the form of gaps in Amazon’s initial offering. EC2 persistence was one. Having only a command line interface and no web client (addressed by this AWS Console announcement) is another. It’s fine for the [...]