ruby on rails, jruby, aws, ec2, exalead

A quick set of notes on how to create a bootable EBS snapshot from a running EC2 instance - for example, an instance that has been started from an S3 backed AMI.

We've had to do this a few times over the last few months - for the benefit of others, we've outlined how we currently do it - this is based on a number of articles that were surfacing at the time of our research, but I don't have the links to hand. If there's a better way out there feel free to jump in!

Amazon have been busy again and today announced the release of three new services in their Web Services portfolio: monitoring, scaling and load balancing.

You can read the details in the blog post on the Amazon Web Services Blog.

I've used VMware for many years to allow me to test and develop various server configurations and distributions. It's where I played with Linux-VServer, User Mode Linux (UML), Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM) and Xen. The relevent part to EC2 here is obviously that EC2 is also Xen based.

So far when using EC2 I've stood on the shoulders of giants and taken existing AMIs and used them as they are or with modification. Always the control freak, I wanted to create my own AMI from scratch. Having slimmed down my hardware inventory (I got complaints about the various half built towers lying around!) then my only option was to either create an image in a loopback device on EC2 or return to my trusty steed of VMware.

Creating the AMI from VMware was easier than I thought - but just in case anyone else is looking to do it then I thought it worthy of a blog post.

As I previously posted Amazon have announced that persistent storage is on it's way for EC2. Sadly the public launch date has not yet been disclosed - it's "coming later in the year". In the meantime this leaves the question of what to do when you need data to persist?

There are a number of options, especially when you start to consider scalability and fault tolerance. I won't dare claim I've considered all the options out there - I've simply started to look at what the immediate options are for persistent storage.

Without further ado, then, on to the technology. I've found a number of choices - rather than this being a 'how to' then it is more about the solutions I have found so far and that are on my list for consideration. Hopefully, if one of the options fits my needs then I will provide a guide at a later date!

Good news - persistent storage for EC2 is on it's way - it's already in private beta and will be 'publicly available later this year'.