Permanence?

[John Shaver]

Currently, with my free micro instance, am I correct in my
understanding that if I were to restart the instance, I would lose
everything in it? It seems there is no persistence of data for the
instance. I've got apache all setup and configured with all of our
files uploaded. How do I go about setting up some kind of
persistence of data? Or is the idea to never stop the instance? I'm
not talking about backups, here, I have those. I just don't want to
have to start with a new OS and restore backups for something as
simple as restarting the instance.

For those of you who have more experience with AWS, how do you setup
your webservers?

One more questions, what is the easiest way to move an instance from
one region to another?

Thank You,

John

[Jonathan Duncan]

On 30 Jul 2012, at 11:16, John Shaver wrote:

> Currently, with my free micro instance, am I correct in my
> understanding that if I were to restart the instance, I would lose
> everything in it? It seems there is no persistence of data for the
> instance. I've got apache all setup and configured with all of our
> files uploaded. How do I go about setting up some kind of
> persistence of data? Or is the idea to never stop the instance? I'm
> not talking about backups, here, I have those. I just don't want to
> have to start with a new OS and restore backups for something as
> simple as restarting the instance.
>

This depends on if you started the instance with an EBS backed AMI. If you did, you should see an EBS volume listed in your volumes. If not, then you are correct in assuming that if you turn off your instance it disappears forever. In order to have persistence, you need to attach a volume.

You could launch a volume, attach it to the current instance, mount it as a filesystem, and copy your setup and then use that to get a persistent instance setup. I do not have any specific procedure on hand, but there may well be some already out there.

> For those of you who have more experience with AWS, how do you setup
> your web servers?

What do you mean? Are you looking for instructions on how to install Apache?

> One more questions, what is the easiest way to move an instance from
> one region to another?
>

I am not sure about this one. It may be tricky. AMI's are not transferrable that I am aware of. You could snapshot your instance, find a similar AMI in another region and transfer data from the snapshot. I have not done this so I am just guessing.

[John Shaver]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 11:33 AM, Jonathan Duncan <jona...@nacnud.com> wrote:
>
> This depends on if you started the instance with an EBS backed AMI. If you did, you should see an EBS volume listed in your volumes. If not, then you are correct in assuming that if you turn off your instance it disappears forever. In order to have persistence, you need to attach a volume.
>
> You could launch a volume, attach it to the current instance, mount it as a filesystem, and copy your setup and then use that to get a persistent instance setup. I do not have any specific procedure on hand, but there may well be some already out there.

Thank you! I think this is exactly what I needed. I think with this
info, I can probably figure out the rest on my own.

>> For those of you who have more experience with AWS, how do you setup
>> your web servers?
>
> What do you mean? Are you looking for instructions on how to install Apache?

Not how to install apache. It was more of a question of, how do you
setup your webservers so that configuration and necessary files have
persistence when the instance is stoped, or do you at all?

>> One more questions, what is the easiest way to move an instance from
>> one region to another?
>>
>
> I am not sure about this one. It may be tricky. AMI's are not transferrable that I am aware of. You could snapshot your instance, find a similar AMI in another region and transfer data from the snapshot. I have not done this so I am just guessing.

That's what I was thinking. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!

[Jonathan Duncan]

On 30 Jul 2012, at 11:43, John Shaver wrote:

> Thank you! I think this is exactly what I needed. I think with this
> info, I can probably figure out the rest on my own.
>

Good, I am glad the information was helpful.

>> What do you mean? Are you looking for instructions on how to install Apache?
>
> Not how to install apache. It was more of a question of, how do you
> setup your webservers so that configuration and necessary files have
> persistence when the instance is stoped, or do you at all?
>

Ah yes, I see what you mean. I think I partially answered this already, but basically what I do is always use an EBS backed instance. That way if the instance is stopped the volume persists and can even be moved to other instances.

You can also keep all your configuration packaged up in a deployment process which can be applied to whatever server you setup. There are many different deployment tools out there. Gary taught me some thing about deployment processes which include using ANT to build APT package that can then be installed easily with "apt-get install". That can be a very good solution, depending on your situation.

>> I am not sure about this one. It may be tricky. AMI's are not transferrable that I am aware of. You could snapshot your instance, find a similar AMI in another region and transfer data from the snapshot. I have not done this so I am just guessing.
>
> That's what I was thinking. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!

No problem and Good luck! Feel free to post your progress here, as it may be helpful to someone else later.


If you want so see some cool possibilities with AWS, watch this short video that talks about their CloudFormation product:

http://bit.ly/rasyfw

Cheers,