Posts tagged as:

aws

S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage with Simple Notification Service: What, Why, and When

July 22, 2010

AWS recently added support for receiving Simple Notification Service notifications when S3 loses a Reduced Redundancy Storage S3 object. This raises a number of questions: What the heck does that even mean? Why would I want to do that? Under what conditions does it make financial sense to do that? Let’s take a look at [...]

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Storing AWS Credentials on an EBS Snapshot Securely

July 19, 2010

Thanks to reader Ewout and his comment on my article How to Keep Your AWS Credentials on an EC2 Instance Securely for suggesting an additional method of transferring credentials: via a snapshot. It’s similar to burning credentials into an AMI, but easier to do and less prone to accidental inclusion in the application’s AMI. Read [...]

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Track Changes to your Dynamic Cloud Services Automatically

June 20, 2010

Dynamic infrastructure can be a pain to accommodate in applications. How do you keep track of the set of web servers in your dynamically scaling web farm? How do your apps keep up with which server is currently running what service? How can applications be written so they don’t need to care if a service [...]

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How I Moved 5% of All Objects in S3 with Jets3t

May 10, 2010

This is a true story about a lot of data. The cast of characters is as follows: The Protagonist: Me. The Hero: Jets3t, a Java library for using Amazon S3. The Villain: Decisions made long ago, for forgotten reasons. Innocent Bystanders: My client. Once Upon a Time… Amazon S3 is a great place to store [...]

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Elastic Load Balancing with Sticky Sessions

April 8, 2010

At long last, the most oft-requested feature for EC2′s Elastic Load Balancer is here: session affinity, also known as “sticky sessions”. What is session affinity? Why is this feature in such high demand? How can it be used with existing applications? Let’s take a look at these questions. But first, let’s explore what a session [...]

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EC2 Reserved Instance Availability Zone Problem? No Problem.

March 17, 2010

You may know that Amazon Web Services Reserved Instances have some gotchas. One of these gotchas is that the availability zone in which the reservation is purchased cannot be changed. So if you need to use an instance in a different availability zone (e.g. if you hit InsufficientCapacity errors*) than your reservation, you’re out of [...]

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Use ELB to Serve Multiple SSL Domains on One EC2 Instance

December 24, 2009

This is one of the coolest uses of Amazon’s ELB I’ve seen yet. Check out James Elwood’s article. You may know that you can’t serve more than one SSL-enabled domain on a single EC2 instance. Okay, you can but only via a wildcard certificate (limited) or a multi-domain certificate (hard to maintain). So you really [...]

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Read-After-Write Consistency in Amazon S3

December 10, 2009

S3 has an “eventual consistency” model, which presents certain limitations on how S3 can be used. Today, Amazon released an improvement called “read-after-write-consistency” in the EU and US-west regions (it’s there, hidden at the bottom of the blog post). Here’s an explanation of what this is, and why it’s cool. What is Eventual Consistency? Consistency [...]

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How to Work with Contractors on AWS EC2 Projects

November 17, 2009

Recently I answered a question on the EC2 forums about how to give third parties access to EC2 instances. I noticed there’s not a lot of info out there about how to work with contractors, consultants, or even internal groups to whom you want to grant access to your AWS account. Here’s how. First, a [...]

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Avoiding EC2 InsufficientInstanceCapacity: Insufficient Capacity Errors

October 17, 2009

Here’s a quick tip from this thread on the AWS EC2 Developer Forums. If you experience the InsufficientInstanceCapacity: Insufficient Capacity error, you’ll be glad to know there are some strategies for working around it. Justin@AWS offers this advice: There can be short periods of time when we are unable to accommodate instance requests that are [...]

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