I am seriously impressed with Amazon’s cloud offering. You get a pick list of virtual machines of different sizes, a CDN, monitoring with elastic forking of new instances, fixed IPs if required, S3, attachable storage and the ability to release software as .amis for easy deployment, map-reduce with Hadoop, load balancing and a payment service.

Each of these is configurable via a RESTful web service. Each one has command-line tools that interact with the web services which you can easily script. And I can see that the new https://console.aws.amazon.com management console will bring this together into an easy to use package. Right now there is a tab for EC2 and another for Map-Reduce. Give it a few more months and I can see this populated with tabs for the other services.

Ehcache Server AMI

I love EC2 so much that I decided to create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Ehcache Server. It is marked public and is available for anyone to use. I see it being used in two ways:

• To quickly try out and demo Ehcache Server. If you have an EC2 account you can be up and running in less than a minute.
• As an example of how to deploy Ehcache Server. The AMI comes with an init.d script for service control and ipchains rules mapping ports 80 and 81. You can use it as a template to create your own AMI with your own cache configuration.

Getting Started

1. Create a new virtual machine. Select ami-3512f45c from the Community AMIs tab. Select a security configuration and a machine size (small is fine) and start it up. Ehcache Server will start automatically.
2. To test it, hit it with http://amazon_instance_address/ehcache/rest/sampleCache1. From there, try writing a client. See the Cache Server documentation for sample client code in several languages.
3. To make configuration changes log into your machine. Ehcache Server is insatalled in /root/ehcache-server-0.7.

Video Tutorial

I have put all this in a video tutorial.