[talk] FreeBSD EC2 Crash Course?

[Charles Sprickman]

Hello all,

I recently setup my first EC2 instance, and that was my very first foray into ?the cloud?.

I am seeing a huge mound of documentation, I am not seeing a nice list of gotchas or a good overview of things like instance storage vs. EBS vs. ephemeral storage and such.

I know there?s a few here that run things on a fairly large scale in Amazon?s cloud - I really only need a few cheap standalone instances. My concerns boil down to:

? How to never lose my public IPs
? How to safely backup the entire instance off-site (none are over 10G)
? Swap (seriously - even something this simple has caveats and apparently if you use EBS you can rack up a huge bill if something spins out of control and hits swap hard)
? Any FreeBSD-specific gotchas beyond Colin?s notes here: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/

In short, I really want to just treat this more like a simple VPS instead of a puppet-ified cloudfront sharknado monster, and I want a recovery path if I break something.

Any pointers?

Thanks,

Charles
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[Pete Wright]

Post by Charles Sprickman
Hello all,
I recently setup my first EC2 instance, and that was my very first foray into ?the cloud?.
I am seeing a huge mound of documentation, I am not seeing a nice list of gotchas or a good overview of things like instance storage vs. EBS vs. ephemeral storage and such.
? How to never lose my public IPs

take a look at using elastic IP addresses:
https://aws.amazon.com/articles/1346

Post by Charles Sprickman
? How to safely backup the entire instance off-site (none are over 10G)

this is possible, although i'd suggest *not* doing this since the
infrastructure to back and restore instances is actually counter
intuitive. with out getting into the nitty gritty details i'd suggest
using tarsnap to backup your userland.

Post by Charles Sprickman
? Swap (seriously - even something this simple has caveats and apparently if you use EBS you can rack up a huge bill if something spins out of control and hits swap hard)

i generally take as many steps as humanly possibly to not swap on ec2.
if that is not an option i'd suggest the following:
-- install your instance on an ephemeral volume
- then -
-- create an EBS volume for your local userland and mount that
--- this gives you the added benefit of snapshotting this volume for
backup and sharing fun b/w multiple instance

Post by Charles Sprickman
? Any FreeBSD-specific gotchas beyond Colin?s notes here: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/

Colin's notes are great for FreeBSD specifics. The AWS documentation is
actually pretty great.

Post by Charles Sprickman
In short, I really want to just treat this more like a simple VPS instead of a puppet-ified cloudfront sharknado monster, and I want a recovery path if I break something.
Any pointers?

i currently approach aws and ec2 in two ways:
- spin up short lived instances on ephemeral disks for specific,
short-term uses. for example, running a proxy in ireland or acting as a
temp R&D playground.

- build a VPC environment for longer-term development. VPC allows you
to own your private subnets and keep things more...well private than
standard ec2 instances. i usually do this on my companies dime since it
had added costs. it is helpful though for doing a full lab buildout for
R&D (for example wanted to demo a new version of my web+db stack).

the last thing i'll note is that aside from spining up very short lived
instances for personal use i tend to shy away from ec2 due to how easy
it is to loose track of costs and get dinged by a bill if you are
careless (like i often am :).

hope this helps!
-pete