Brian Hartsock's Blog

Moving into the cloud is a big paradigm shift. Its hard to imagine what such a big change might look like, so start small. Don’t try to offload your whole system at once. Offload the small stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

One interesting use case for using the cloud is backup integrity checks for databases. Here is the scenario. You are doing backups regularly of your databases. You need to restore them every once and a while and verify they aren’t corrupt. There are a few options:

• Run this on your production server – Asking for trouble
• Run this on a dedicated server for integrity checks – $$$ Expensive
• Run this on a shared machine – Sharing is for adolescents, your developers should share as little as possible

But there is one more option, infrastructure in the cloud. One of my teams recently started using cloud servers to perform the actual verification checks. So you continue to do the backups as normal. But now, your integrity checks spin up a new server in a few minutes, upload the data and verification code, and run the tests. Once your done, you spin down the server and your done. (Cloud servers doesn’t have an API yet, so we just leave a cheap instance running currently, but once the API is released it will be fully automated)

This is very useful for a few reasons. You don’t mess with your production environment. You only need a small amount of computing power to accomplish this, so you only pay for a small amount of computing power. You don’t share servers, so one team can’t hurt other teams.

Once you understand the new paradigm, super simple solutions to problems start appearing everywhere. Don’t try to rewrite everything at once, just start making small iterative changes that make sense.

Elasticfox was good while it lasted, but I definitely think Amazon took a step in the right direction with their console. Now almost anyone can play with EC2 without much of a commitment.

I started playing around Amazon EC2 today. After hearing cloud this and cloud that all day long for the past few months, I decided to get some experience with cloud computing myself. Unfortunately, Amazon Web Services aren’t as casual user friendly as I had hoped. Here are just a few thoughts on EC2 after 24 hours of use.

Elasticfox to the rescue. Elasticfox is a must have for the trial EC2 user. All the functionality of EC2 is right at your finger tips in a single Firefox extension. As a side note, I also found S3Fox as well so I can see what Jungle Disk is doing behind the scenes and manage my buckets.

The base Windows images are fairly worthless outside of testing SQL Server 2005. Installing Windows components is a pain. Amazon has an article on how to do it, which being the casual user I am, I chose not to read.

I attempted to bundle an AMI after installing SQL Server SP1, but it required a shutdown, which is apparently different than an image terminate. I lost interest after that. I will probably play around some more tomorrow.

What’s the final word? I tried it out and it cost me about $5. It might be useful, but getting everything setup the way I would like is going to take a decent amount more time. It wasn’t the super easy to test things development environment I was hoping for though. Maybe $50 will get me there.

Watching it now. You should too.

I’ll blog more on it later.