How to start an EC2 Ubuntu Server for your developer in 6 minutes | Hacker News Reader

How to start an EC2 Ubuntu Server for your developer in 6 minutes

edukatr.com

46 pointsedukatr11 comments

Spinning up servers like this is nice, but if all you want is a vanilla install, Rackspace is definitely the way to go. Their web site is far more user friendly, and they've got a nice iPhone app you can use to spin servers up and down as you like.

Amazon's advantage seems to lie in the far wider variety of machine images available, and in better tools for making custom images.

From a pricing standpoint I have found Rackspace to be more flexible at the lower end 256MB slice but once you start going higher toward 1.5GB RAM it gets more pricier than Amazon. I am guessing you were referring to RackSpace Cloud. The pure Rackspace solution is very pricy compared to AWS.

Very cool. Are there AMIs that include ubuntu + web framework stacks? (say, rails+nginx+passenger)

Take a look at TurnKey Linux. We just announced free access to all AMI's (40), including Rails, Django, Symfony, LAMP stack, Drupal6, Joomla, Wordpress, File Server, Domain Controller, Torrent Server, Redmine, MediaWiki, Zimbra and many others.

Optimizations for EC2 include a custom developed mechanism (EBSmount) that auto-mounts EBS devices when attached, support for automating EC2 instance setup via user-data scripts, security updates installed on boot (prevents window of vulnerability) and an AJAX web shell and a rich web administration interface (over SSL).

Announcement: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/maintenance-release

EC2 Details: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/ec2

Thanks for this info! This is a lot of software. Is it better to then build the stack one needs on top of the basic OS and then store it in S3 (cheaper than EBS) as your custom AMI and fire that up as needed?

I use rubber, which bootstraps that kind of setup from a stock Ubuntu AMI: http://github.com/wr0ngway/rubber/

Oh, that's cool. Do you (or anyone else) know of anything similar to rubber, but for Fabric?

There's Ian Bicking's http://cloudsilverlining.org/ (formerly toppcloud), but it intentionally doesn't use Fabric.

Spandex?

Ok, that is actually very funny :)

I definitely did not think of this when I asked the question, but if it turns out there is no project "similar to rubber, but for Fabric", I may start one, and I'll most certainly call it "Spandex".

Did you ever start "Spandex"? LOL

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