IOOS appliance - Xenia Amazon Machine Instance(AMI) ami-9028caf9

[jcothran]

The latest server image of our production development environment is
available as a publicly shared AMI at Amazon Web Services with
AMI ID = ami-9028caf9

Server virtualization at the remote cloud level(Amazon in this case)
allows developers to more quickly and easily package,share and scale
our working tool and code development environments with others.

To instantiate this server instance, you will need to create a credit-
card based account which Amazon can bill the server charges to. The
pricing fees are listed at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing and the
default basic server is currently billed at 8.5 cents per hour or
about $2 per day. Server monitoring can also be enabled for 1.5 cents
per hour.

Documentation on the setup and utilization of this AMI package is at
http://code.google.com/p/xenia/wiki/AmazonWebServices

This server instance is an Ubuntu 8.10 version based OS, which uses
previously developed scripts(perl mostly) to support a variety of
output formats and web services http://code.google.com/p/xenia/wiki/VMwareProducts
from a source relational database(PostgreSQL+PostGIS, schema label is
'Xenia'). The current aggregation datatype focus is in-situ data
(buoys,stations,drifters,gliders,etc). This vm was was developed on
top of 'gisvm'http://gisvm.com (November 2008 version) which includes
many popular open source geospatial tools. The scripts developed
include/support:

Eric Bridger's RDB to Oostethys SOS script
http://code.google.com/p/xenia/wiki/XeniaSOS#Oostethys_SOS
IOOS DIF SOS http://code.google.com/p/xenia/wiki/XeniaSOS#DIF_SOS
GeoJSON http://code.google.com/p/xenia/wiki/VMwareProducts#GeoJSON

The intented usage of this server image would be that a data provider
would only have to instantiate and setup the initial image and know
how to get data into the database via ObsKML(XML) or SQL directly and
would automatically have several formats,services and tools readily
available for data management and sharing. The image(s)/appliances
should be an ongoing production development snapshot of what we're
doing within Secoora http://secoora.org made available to the
observing community. Glad to incorporate scripts/documentation which
leverage the xenia RDB schema directly or more generally abstracted
database view/resultset scripts which utilize those data elements
captured by the xenia schema.

Would be interested to see more appliance/turn-key type approaches and
further appliance type 'remixes' of various community tools to fit
various audience needs. Also glad to discuss/document with others as
interested in the creating their own initial AMI's as I've documented
at http://code.google.com/p/xenia/wiki/VMwareInstall#Amazon_Web_Services
or AMI or other virtualization issues.

Also documented some project and publication links at the Calit2
website http://code.google.com/p/xenia/wiki/XeniaHome#Calit2 which are
the technical leads on the OOI project and also reference Amazon EC2
cloud computing heavily also - if anyone has openly available links to
Calit2's open-source project code, documentation or available AMI
images I would be interested in having a look and comparing,
especially as regards near real-time in-situ observations.

Thanks

Jeremy