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davidgerard

If you buy a VM on Amazon, you get to do your apt-get updates yourself. And yes, managing it is a PITA.

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Shouldn't be a PITA. Look into Vagrant, ansible, salt stack, chef, puppet etc.

Does vagrant apply in this situation? I thought it was only for dev machines

Flying_Dwarf: Your account is hellbanned (seems to be for talking about hipsters in SF), just FYI.

How does salt compare with puppet?

Fabric also works great.

If you ice ubuntu... JuJu is terrific for either VM or container use. I have used it to deploy all of open stack services into a single "super size" AWS EC2 VM where the open stack was configured to use LXC as its virtualization. Worked fine for what I wanted. To back up or clone that open stack cloud only required me to snapshot that single EC2 instance.

Roll your servers more often. If you have autoscaling set up, you should be good to go. Yes, this is harder for infrastructure servers, but you should automate the creation of those as well.

Not really. I don't do any customer-oriented things on EC2 so my experience may differ, but to manage my VM's I just setup a bunch of cronjobs to update everything, reboot every so often and start my programs and services after each reboot.

apt-get update; apt-get upgrade after you try that on a clone machine. it's not a PITA unless you're super lazy which apparently many people are.

Easy for one machine. Now do it for 5, or 10, or 100.

Remember that those machines all have slightly different software on them, so it's not simple to automate. Unless you're manage systems with something (eg puppet) it's not just a PITA or a question of laziness - it's a real task that takes up hours, not a quick 15-minute job you run over a coffee break, and that's assuming no breakage.

And at least with ubuntu you can pass user data to a new container just like on AWS EC2 to initialize a new container with specific apt-get installs etc

That's fine so long as you have a full test suite to exercise the app - catch small mail server configuration changes, apparmor and MySQL (we got bitten by that when upgrading to MySQL 5.5 from 5.1) et al - it's not a matter of saying "hey this looks like it's running" but verifying there's no regressions either.

Mind you containers don't help with this either...

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