Suggestion about Amazon EC2, S3, etc
Tonight I did a bunch of modifications to my AMI and followed the directions to bundle it again and push it to S3 for storage. The process worked like it did the first time, pretty smooth. Then I found that ALL of the website files I uploaded were GONE. Back to where I started this morning, apparently.
If you're like me and are a relative newb to setting up EC2 servers, you might be running into a similar problem I've been noticing.
Documentation and process for all of this "cloud computing" crap sucks.
Amazon's basic Getting Started guide is decent. Then it falls off a cliff. Its enough to introduce the concepts and get you to the starting line of having "a server". Beyond that, a lot of the documentation that sits on their own developer site is scattered around. Some is in blog posts, some in wikis, some on poorly-designed information pages. A lot of its out of date.
When you start looking around the web for 3rd party information, some is good and most is bad. Right Scale talks a lot about what they're doing and at a high level, its helpful. But they don't go much deeper in explaining things.
There are dozens of introductory blog posts that are meant to teach you how to get started, but most of these are really nothing more than poor rehashes of Amazon's own Getting Started guide. They all lead up to a certain point and assume you are ready to go and build the next Smugmug.
A lot of other "guides" focus on how you too can setup massively scaling virtual server farms with multiply redundant virtual RAID, load balancers, and anti-Cylon defense systems, all running on Ruby on Rails. Guess what, I don't need to know that yet. Its DEFINITELY interesting, but its way beyond what I want to do yet.
All I want to do is hack. I want to build. I want to be able to learn a couple new things a day, be able to implement them relatively easily, and be able to sit back and feel like I've accomplished something. And the stuff I've learned SHOULD STILL BE THERE THE NEXT GOD DAMNED DAY.
I am mad because I want to learn this stuff and everything is so scattered around that its like pulling teeth to figure out what I need to do next.
What people like me need is good documentation. Mostly-full API docs (which we already have thankfully) combined with process guides on how to build simple servers that progress on to more complicated setups.
There are a lot of us struggling developer-types working alone that want to build and execute on our ideas, but we're being caught up in the minutiae of laying brick and plumbing. Not because the brick and plumbing is hard, but because all the pages of the Do-it-Yourself book are scattered around the Home Depots and Lowes across 10 states. If we could just get the manual with all the pages in one place, instead of having to hunt them down like it was National Treasure III, then we can have fun figuring out how to engineer for the cloud, and then actually build are dreams.