Tag: ec2

What is the difference between terminating and stopping an EC2 instance?

by scmgalaxy KAmazon Web ServicesLeave a Comment on What is the difference between terminating and stopping an EC2 instance?

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Answer

Terminate Instance

When you terminate an EC2 instance, the instance will be shutdown and the virtual machine that was provisioned for you will be permanently taken away and you will no longer be charged for instance usage. Any data that was stored locally on the instance will be lost. Any attached EBS volumes will be detached and deleted. However, if you attach an EBS Snapshot to an instance at boot time, the default option in the Dashboard is to delete the attached EBS volume upon termination.

Stop Instance

When you stop an EC2 instance, the instance will be shutdown and the virtual machine that was provisioned for you will be permanently taken away and you will no longer be charged for instance usage. The key difference between stopping and terminating an instance is that the attached bootable EBS volume will not be deleted. The data on your EBS volume will remain after stopping while all information on the local (ephemeral) hard drive will be lost as usual. The volume will continue to persist in its availability zone. Standard charges for EBS volumes will apply. Therefore, you should only stop an instance if you plan to start it again within a reasonable timeframe. Otherwise, you might want to terminate an instance instead of stopping it for cost saving purposes.

The ability to stop an instance is only supported on instances that were launched using an EBS-based AMI where the root device data is stored on an attached EBS volume as an EBS boot partition instead of being stored on the local instance itself. As a result, one of the key advantages of starting a stopped instance is that it should theoretically have a faster boot time. When you start a stopped instance the EBS volume is simply attached to the newly provisioned instance. Although, the AWS-id of the new virtual machine will be the same, it will have new IP Addresses, DNS Names, etc. You shouldn’t think of starting a stopped instance as simply restarting the same virtual machine that you just stopped as it will most likely be a completely different virtual machine that will be provisioned to you.

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Powerful New Amazon EC2 Boot Features – Introduction

by scmgalaxy KAmazon (Elastic Cloud)Leave a Comment on Powerful New Amazon EC2 Boot Features – Introduction

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Today a powerful new feature is available for our Amazon EC2 customers: the ability to boot their instances from Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store).

Customers like the simplicity of the AMI (Amazon Machine Image) model where they either choose a preconfigured AMI or upload their own AMI into Amazon S3. A wide variety of operating systems and software configurations is available for use. But customers have also asked us for more flexibility and control in the way that Amazon EC2 instances are booted such that they have finer grained control over for example what software configurations and data sets are available to the instance at boot time.

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The ability to boot from Amazon EBS gives customers very powerful control over the boot configuration of the Amazon EC2 instances. In the traditional boot process, the root partition of the image will be the local disk, which is created and populated at boot time. In the new Amazon EBS boot process, the root partition is an Amazon EBS volume, which is created at boot time from an Amazon EBS snapshot. Other Amazon EBS volumes beyond the root disk can also made part of the instance before it is booted. This allows for a very fine-grain control of software and data configuration. An additional advantage of using the Amazon EBS boot process is that root partitions are no longer constrained by the size of the local disk and can be up to 1TB in size. And the new boot process is significantly faster because a local disk no longer needs to be populated.

With this new boot process another powerful feature is available to our Amazon EC2 customers: the ability to stop an instance and restart it at a later time with the disk configuration intact. When an instance is restarted, the customer can choose to use a different instance type (e.g., with more memory or CPU), a different operating system (e.g., with new security patches installed), or add new user data. While the instance is stopped it does not accrue any usage hours and customers are only charged for the storage associated with the Amazon EBS volume. The ability to stop and restart an instance is a very powerful mechanism that makes management of instances much easier; many scenarios related to adaptive instance sizing and software management have now become much simpler.

The new boot from Amazon EBS feature is an important step in our continuing quest to remove more and more of the heavy lifting that comes with today’s computer environments.

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EC2Deploy and the Cloud Tools Maven plugin are now available

by scmgalaxy KAmazon (Elastic Cloud) / MavenLeave a Comment on EC2Deploy and the Cloud Tools Maven plugin are now available

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I’m pleased to announce that EC2Deploy – a Groovy-based framework for deploying Java EE applications to Amazon EC2 – is now available as part of the Cloud Tools open source project.

There are three main parts to Cloud Tools:

  • The EC2Deploy framework
  • Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that are configured to run Tomcat and work with EC2Deploy
  • A Maven plugin that uses EC2Deploy to deploy a web application to EC2

I’m especially excited about the Maven plugin. Once you have configured the plugin for your web application you can use the following goals:

  • cloudtools:deploy – launch the EC2 instances and deploy the web application
  • cloudtools:redeploy – redeploy the web application (upload the changes and restart tomcat)
  • cloudtools:jmeter – run a Jmeter test
  • cloudtools:stop – stop the EC2 instances

Cloudtools is still work in progress but it let’s you deploy a web application on EC2 in just a few minutes.  To learn more go to Cloud Tools.

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Amazon EC2 key pairs and other stumbling blocks – Guide

by scmgalaxy KAmazon (Elastic Cloud)Leave a Comment on Amazon EC2 key pairs and other stumbling blocks – Guide

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While working with Cloud Tools and Cloud Foundry users, I have noticed that EC2 key pairs and security group configuration are common stumbling blocks for people who are new to Amazon EC2. When you sign up for an AWS account you get what can be, at first, a confusing set of credentials:  an access key id,  a secret access key, X509 certificate and a corresponding private key. You authenticate an AWS request using either the access key id and secret access key or the X509 certificate and private key. Some APIs and tools support both options, where was others support just one. And, to make matters worse, to launch an EC2 instance and access it via SSH you must use a (named) EC2 key pair. This EC2 key pair is not the same as the X509 certificate/private key given to you by AWS during sign up. But they are easily confused since they both consist of private and public keys.

You create a EC2 key pair by using one of the AWS tools: command line tools, ElasticFox plugin or the rather nice AWS console. Under the covers these tools make an AWS request to create the key pair.

Here is a screenshot of the AWS Console showing how you create a key pair.

Creating a Key Pair

There are three steps:

  1. Select Key Pairs
  2. Click  Create Key Pair
  3. Enter the name of the Key Pair you want to create – you chose the name

The console will then create the key pair and prompt you to save the private key.

Saving a key pair

You specify the key pair name in the AWS request that launches the instances and specify the private key file as the -i argument to ssh when connecting to the instance.Just make sure you save the key pair in safe place.

Another stumbling block is that you need to enable SSH in the AWS firewall. Both Cloud Tools and Cloud Foundry use SSH to configure the instances and deploy the application. If SSH is blocked then they won’t work. Fortunately, the AWS firewall (a.k.a. security groups) is extremely easy to configure using the AWS tools – command line tools, ElasticFox plugin or the nice AWS console – by editing the default security group to allow SSH traffic.

The good news is that these are relatively minor hurdles to overcome. Once you have sorted out your EC2 key pair and edited the security groups to enable SSH using Cloud Tools or Cloud Foundry to deploy your web application is very easy.

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