Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a set of services that together form a reliable, scalable, and inexpensive computing platform "in the cloud". If you have a question about a specific web service, consider asking on its tag, e.g., amazon-ec2.
22
votes
7answers
13k views
How can I get the size of an Amazon S3 bucket?
I'd like to graph the size (in bytes, and # of items) of an Amazon S3 bucket and am looking for an efficient way to get the data.
The s3cmd tools provide a way to get the total file size using s3cmd ...
21
votes
9answers
12k views
Why should I use Amazon Route 53 over my registrar's DNS servers?
I am building a site that I anticipate will have high usage. Currently, my registrar (GoDaddy) is handling DNS. However, Amazon's Route 53 looks interesting. They promise high speed and offer globally ...
16
votes
3answers
6k views
How can I deploy a scalable, reliable haproxy cluster on Amazon EC2?
We need some more advanced functionality than ELB provides (mostly L7 inspection), but it's not obvious how to handle things like heartbeat and high availability with something like haproxy using EC2. ...
16
votes
2answers
1k views
Which AWS features are EBS backed?
I recently read an article AWS: The good, the bad and ugly, which mentioned that they've moved off of all EBS backed AWS features. What features are explicity (EBS backed EC2 instances) or implicitly ...
11
votes
4answers
808 views
How do you keep up with Nagios/Capistrano configs when using EC2?
I use Amazon EC2 for my mobile app. Depending on load of the application at a given time, I might spawn new instances and then take them down when load is lower to save costs.
How does one keep up ...
10
votes
2answers
3k views
Shrinking Amazon EBS volume size
I have seen this answer for growing EBS volumes, but I would like to shrink one.
The default Ubuntu Server images are 15 GB while I really need only 2 GB max (I use a different volume for data). Is ...
10
votes
5answers
3k views
Amazon EC2: possible to use elastic load balancing across web servers in multiple regions based on location of client?
Related to an another question I asked. This question seems similar but I'm wondering if there are any updates.
To support a single site that has users all over the world, I will create EC2 web ...
9
votes
4answers
9k views
How to download public key from Amazon AWS?
I have a running amazon ec2 linux instance associated with a keypair (p1) and I have downloaded the private key to my home desktop. Now at work, I created a keypair (p2) on my work desktop and ...
9
votes
3answers
2k views
How to recreate a working AMI from recovery snapshot after Aug 8 outage?
After Amazon's Aug 8 outage, all (EBS based) AMIs stopped working for many users. This is due to corruption of some sectors in snapshots that the AMIs are based on.
However, Amazon created recovery ...
9
votes
4answers
1k views
Amazon EC2 spot instances - is there a catch?
I needed to start a new EC2 instance today and decided to try out the new spot instances, where you can reduce your instance cost by bidding on the maximum per-hour price you're prepared to pay. ...
8
votes
5answers
2k views
Which is faster for read access on EC2; local drive or EBS?
Which is faster for read access on an EC2 instance; the "local" drive or an attached EBS volume?
I have some data that needs to be persisted so have placed this on an EBS volume. I'm using ...
8
votes
2answers
8k views
Where does Amazon publish the range of IP addresses used for EC2 instances by region?
How can I keep updated of changes to the range of IP addresses that Amazon will use for EC2 instances. I want to add a range of IPs to my firewall settings to allow access to my 'ground based' mysql ...
8
votes
7answers
14k views
Why can't I ssh into my new EC2 Instance?
I created a new instance (tiny, 64 bit AMI linux from Amazon)
Created a new key pair called "mir".
I downloaded mir.pem and put it in my ~/.ssh folder.
I even did ssh-add mir.pem.
Then I tried to ...
8
votes
2answers
382 views
How do Amazon Machine Images work?
I've seen many tutorials and such about creating AMI's, but I've never really understood the full concept of an AMI. Is a link to the instance, or is it stored and never changed. Also, does an image ...
8
votes
6answers
4k views
How can I monitor daily spending on AWS?
Our infrastructure is on AWS. I want to get a daily report on how much spent on the previous day. What is the best way to do it?
8
votes
2answers
3k views
EC2 - Shared Storage - S3FS or EBS?
Building my web service onto EC2 right now and have a single instance behind a load balancer. I will of course cater for multiple instances.
My initial idea was to run all the instances a dumb ...
7
votes
2answers
675 views
Convert file system format on AWS EC2 ephemeral storage disk from ext3 to ext4
I have an instance-store EC2 instance with Ubuntu 11.04 i386. At present my disk partition looks like this:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1 9.9G 529M ...
7
votes
3answers
4k views
Are Amazon EC2 Private IPs reachable from any instance running in EC2?
After searching previous questions here, the general consensus seems to be if an instance that I own is assigned a private IP of 10.208.34.55, that only OTHER INSTANCES I OWN can reach it at that ...
7
votes
4answers
6k views
Is it possible to move an AWS EC2 AMI from one region to another region and if so how?
I have an AWS EC2 AMI in the EU region. I want to move it to the US region. The root device type is EBS and the OS is Linux.
Is it possible to transfer the image to the US region and if so how?
7
votes
1answer
760 views
XFS: no space left on device, (but I have 850GB available!)
I'm using a combination of mdadm, lvm2, and XFS on Amazon EC2.
So far, I've had success running a RAID 5 volume built from a number of EBS volumes. The EBS volumes are attached and used with mdadm to ...
7
votes
3answers
363 views
Moving all internal servers to the cloud
Background
One of my clients is an IT-dependent workflow-driven law firm with about 50 seats. They have been audited by one of their clients (an FSA regulated mortgage lender) and told that their ...
7
votes
2answers
2k views
RDS Replication across regions
We are using Amazon AWS for our web services but given the recent instabilities in their infrastructure, we are trying to figure out how to run our application across multiple regions for additional ...
7
votes
1answer
691 views
Has anyone achieved Level 1 PCI compliance on AWS?
All the FAQs, documents and statements published by AWS aside, did any Level 1 merchant actually achieve PCI compliance on AWS yet? We're evaluating moving some of our services to EC2/VPC, but our ...
7
votes
2answers
1k views
Amazon S3 and Access-Control-Allow-Origin
Does Amazon S3 allow custom headers? Or am I out of luck?
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Thanks in advance!
6
votes
4answers
920 views
Why do AWS spot-instance prices spike above the “on demand” pricing?
Amazon Pricing on Spot Instance Inconsistencies
This is something which will be best explained through screenshots of a historical chart of instance pricings.
If you look at a lot of the instance ...
6
votes
3answers
11k views
Download existing EC2 key pair
I am playing around with Amazon EC2 and have (finally) managed to SSH into the box from my home machine. Now I want to connect from my work machine but neglected to copy the key pair on a USB key.
Is ...
6
votes
3answers
2k views
How to get the amount of free disk space with CloudWatch?
Is it possible to get the amount of free disk space (df) with CloudWatch? If so, what metric represents the free disk space?
6
votes
2answers
493 views
What are common strategies for configuration management on EC2?
Without using a 3rd party cloud configuration service, what are common patterns/strategies or whitepapers written on the subject of configuration management with EC2? Specifically on how to configure ...
6
votes
1answer
708 views
SSL redirect on EC2 instance behind SSL terminating load balancer
I'm trying to redirect all url's to https in a web application.
I have an ec2 instance behind an elastic load balancer. SSL is terminated on the load balancer.
Any attempts at redirection end up ...
6
votes
2answers
2k views
How do I attach an Elastic IP to an Elastic Beanstalk app?
I can give a single instance an Elastic IP. No problem.
But I have an Elastic Beanstalk app. It can create and remove instances as needed. It has a load balancer. How can I get these features ...
6
votes
2answers
2k views
AWS S3 Backup Strategies - How should I approach backing up S3 buckets?
I am in the process of building a web-app with potential for a massive amount of storage requirements which can be satisfied by amazon S3.
My main concern is the usage of API keys on the server, and ...
6
votes
3answers
1k views
How to cap bandwidth usage on AWS EC2?
I'm planning to use AWS EC2 for my web application and I need control over the bandwidth usage (don't want the instances to be compromised and ramping up bandwidth cost crazily). There are many ...
5
votes
4answers
734 views
Easy way to convert custom 32-bit AMI into 64-bit one?
I have customised (EBS-backed) AMI for running a demo version of an application of ours. (The AMI contains Ubuntu 11.04 with a Tomcat & MySQL setup for the app itself, and Jenkins for easy ...
5
votes
9answers
3k views
EC2 IP Address : How can a web server identify db server ip address at startup?
I have a simple 2-tier arrangement - one web server (Websphere hosted on windows), and one oracle db server. The web server needs to connect the oracle database server.
I am trying to write a script ...
5
votes
2answers
11k views
how do i set the dns server on godaddy with AWS?
I have a domain name on godaddy and i also have a amazon web services account. I have an EC2 instance and i want to change the dns nameserver on the godaddy control panel to aws and i have no idea ...
5
votes
4answers
2k views
AWS EC2 and build-essential
I am trying to compile Node.js on Amazon EC2, but I can't even install "build essential". Where's the problem?
Thanks.
sudo yum install build-essential
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, security
...
5
votes
2answers
5k views
CNAME record for Amazon S3 — any drawbacks?
I'd like to make a CNAME record for my Amazon S3 domain, to have nicer URLs.
There's not much discussion of this out there on the web, and nothing at all in the Amazon documentation (unless I'm ...
5
votes
4answers
1k views
set Google Apps SPF record in Amazon AWS Route 53
I'm using the new AWS GUI for Route 53 to setup my domain records. However, the AWS console won't accept the recommended Google Apps SPF record, v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all (found here).
It ...
5
votes
2answers
475 views
Is it feasible/common for people to use only AWS to host PHP/MySQL websites?
What are the drawbacks/limitations when compared to a more traditional managed shared/virtual/dedicated host?
5
votes
4answers
518 views
On AWS do I have to open ports in an EC2 instance's firewall as well as security group?
If I change my SSH port from 22 to 23453, I can no longer ssh in.
In more detail, I'm using a Red Hat EC2 instance on Amazon Web Services. This is the second change I've on a fresh install (first ...
5
votes
4answers
1k views
Best Amazon AWS region for Australian website?
What is the best Amazon AWS region to host a website for an Australian audience?
Amazon's marketing material seems to suggest that Singapore is the best place, but the ping tests I've performed have ...
5
votes
1answer
655 views
Does anyone have any experience when it comes to speed of Amazon RDS vs MySQL on a Small server?
EC2 Small vs Amazon RDS - which is faster for MySQL?
(I have one database, well-indexed and tuned. About 10,000 rows on each table.)
How's the performance like?
5
votes
5answers
2k views
Automated snapshots of EBS-backed EC2 instance running Ubuntu
I'm running an EBS-backed instance which acts as a software development team's build server (running Jenkins and host of other services). The server is running Linux (latest Ubuntu from the official ...
5
votes
4answers
3k views
Amazon EC2 tools for Debian?
What is the recommended way of getting command-line Amazon EC2 tools on Debian? So, basically the same as this question, but for EC2 instead of S3.
Ubuntu has ec2-ami-tools and ec2-api-tools, but I ...
5
votes
2answers
748 views
Periodic spiky CPU usage by winlogon / LogonUI
I've noticed that my AWS server occasionally starts using a bunch of CPU for no particular reason, looking something like this:
Observe that it does not occur at specific times, but has a very ...
5
votes
1answer
14k views
How to add user with SFTP/ FTP access to '/var/www/html/website_abc' folder on Amazon EC2 Centos? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Linux directory permissions
I'm working with some third-party developers and I would like to grant SFTP (or FTP) access to the root folder for a website they're working ...
5
votes
3answers
1k views
Shutting an EC2 instance down locally (on the instance)?
edit: this seems to be a problem specifically with the AMI that I am trying to shut down. Other AMIs politely shut down with the "sudo poweroff" command.
The goal is for an EC2 instance to shut ...
5
votes
1answer
904 views
At what point is EBS usage the bottleneck?
I've got a site hosted on Amazon using a EC2 instance backed by an EBS volume. On the weekends, traffic spikes and I make the instance larger which helps quite a bit -- I'm no longer seeing CPU usage ...
5
votes
1answer
231 views
Google c2dm transient 401 errors on some AWS instances
How can we figure out why we're getting occasional 401 errors from the Google c2dm push service on some AWS instances when asking c2dm to deliver a notification?
This is a transient problem. All AWS ...
5
votes
1answer
320 views
Convert EC2 instance to VMware workstation
How can I export one windows instance (with active directory, SQL, SharePoint) from amazon (EC2) to my local environment, and be able run it on a local VMware workstation?
I have used the VMware ...
