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!

At the end of my last blog about Paperclip I mentioned that you need to do some patching if you want to use European S3 buckets to store your files. The problem was introduced when Paperclip made the move from RightAWS to Marcel Molina’s AWS::S3 gem. Unfortunately despite several forks containing patches to AWS::S3 and a 4 month old bug report nothing has been done to officially fix the problem.

So my fellow Europeans, what are we to do?

Way back last November when I first blogged about Paperclip I included a brief mention of hiding files behind a controller rather than simply putting them in the public directory for all to see. Since then I’ve noticed that the question of how to actually do this has come up regularly over on Rails Forum and a couple of weeks ago I had to figure out how to update some of our code to protect assets that we had migrated from local file system to Amazon S3 storage. So I figured it’s probably a worthwhile technique to share.

Amazon have now launched their Content Delivery Network - CloudFront

In line with the other offerings from Amazon Web Services then the product is based around Usage Based Charging - with the prices varying between Edge locations

There are Edge servers located in the United States, Europe, Hong Kong and Japan.

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'.