So what on earth am I up to these days? I just spent two days learning about Amazon EC2 and deciding how I’m going to run a web server on it. I’m using a public AMI (Amazon Machine Image) that’s EBS (Elastic Block Store) backed.

To run what you would think of as a web server, you really need an Instance whose Root Device is an Elastic Block Store. Otherwise, all data persisted to your Instance is lost if your Instance is Terminated. You can leave it running forever… if you want to pay 8.5 cents per hour. To be able to stop an Instance, so you don’t have to pay for it while you’re sleeping, it has to be EBS backed. An EBS costs 10 cents per GB per month. Far less than 8.5 cents per hour.

The public AMI I used as my base is ami-0efc1467. It’s a Ubuntu Linux 10.10 Maverick Meerkat image.

I installed the LAMP stack.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

I installed PhpMyAdmin

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin
(got a 404 Not Found until I ran:)
sudo ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin /var/www
(but I think that all I needed to do was restart apache:)
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I’m spending the rest of my day deciding if I ought to use simpleDB instead of MySQL, and learning how to forward HTTP requests to the right places so that the right code handles them. And I still need to decide what language to write my server code in. Thinking PHP.

After I take care of those decisions, and handle any installation/configuration of tools, I’ll create my own AMI so I can have an easy way to start from scratch.