Amazon Route 53 DNS web service as part of AWS

A few days ago I've read about Amazon Route 53 (nice name by the way).  Amazon Route 53 (beta) is a DNS web service solution that seamlessly integrated with AWS services. DNS server job, or in this case a web service, is to route traffic to specific locations where there is a machine which host an application or data. When you put a domain (or sub domain) url in your browser, your domain registrar is usually the one that route your traffic bu utilizing DNS server itself.  Take GoDaddy for example, with GoDaddy you can manage your DNS server quite easily and route the traffic to any IP address of your choice. Another alternative is to use 3rd party DNS servers by defining the DNS servers via your registrar DNS server's setting.

AWS raised S3 block size limit from 5GB to 5TB [NEWS]

For those of you who are relying on Amazon S3 to store your files, you will be happy to hear that Amazon Web Services has increased the object size limit on their Simple Storage Service. Until now, S3 users could only store objects up to 5GB. Amazon Web Services has decided to lift that limit and allow block storage up to 5TB. This is a HUGE upgrade, and I am sure there will be many users who will take advantage of it.

Can't access Amazon EC2 on Instance start up [TIP]

If you stopped your Amazon EC2 instance and start it again, you might found that you can't access your server using your domain name. If you use an Elastic IP address and attached it to your running instance, you should know that when stopping your instance, Amazon detaches the Elastic IP address from your running instance. It happens automatically when you click the 'stop' button/link (right click on the EC2 instance name in Amazon management console). It happens to me several times and every time I felt stupid, trying to figure out what's the problem.

Clicking the 'Stop' link will stop your EC2 instance and
Detach your Elastic IP address.

IP.Board upload folder mounted with s3fs as Amazon S3 bucket

I've sent Invision Power support a ticket, asking them if they know about any restrictions or problems which I might have with my s3fs configuration. I have install IP.Board and make my /upload folder mounted as a FUSE filesystem on Amazon S3. By doing so, I actually created an infinite, durable and scalable storage device (that's what I've wanted in the first place). Even so, I don't know if IP.Board script has any complications with this kind of setup. I will update you when I receive a ticket response.

Image hosting on Amazon S3 or EBS? - Infinite scalable storage

The main reason I have decided to choose Amazon S3 + s3fs as my current image hosting solution was mainly due to storage space and scalability. I am probably looking into the future, where I guess I will have the need for a very large image storage quota. With Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), I am limited to a maximum of 1TB of image storage space. This space can be filled quite fast, especially if you intend to store some high resolution images on it.

How to unmount S3 bucket from s3fs? [UNSOLVED]

I did a mistake when mounting the s3fs FUSE-based file system. I think that I've needed to apply the 'allow_other' -o option to make Amazon S3 bucket files readable by anonymous visitors. In order to do that, I am searching for a way to unmount the S3 bucket via the s3fs command and re-mount my uploads folder again.  I've read in several places that I need to kill the s3fs daemon to unmount the S3 bucket but I don't have any idea how to do that. Maybe there is an option to allow_other without unmounting the S3 bucket via s3fs command, but again, I have no idea how to do that.

Make S3 uploaded files readable for everyone and availability [UNSOLVED]

Yesterday I've read on a forum post that it takes time from when you upload a file to Amazon S3 bucket and until you have it available. I am not sure that I understood it correctly, so I have decided to make a test. Because I have installed/mounted an un-cached S3 bucket on my Amazon EC2 instance, all I had to do is to create a file on my /mnt folder and try to read it through the browser. As you will soon find out, I got into some problems with S3 files permissions, which I still haven't solved completely yet.

Amazon S3 Access Denied when reading S3 bucket files [SOLVED]

Today I have found a way to solve the S3 Access Denied error which I had yesterday. What I did, I installed S3 Firefox organizer, which is an Amazon S3 manager extension for Firefox browsers. I followed the steps as written in this article. After installing S3 Firefox Organizer (S3fox), I did the following:

Access S3 buckets as subdirectory and making bucket publicly readable

After solving the s3fs installation error, I thought that this is a good time to map my S3 bucket to the same name convention I have chosen for it. I've found a good article on Amazon called 'Virtual Hosting of Buckets'. The article discusses several methods for accessing your Amazon S3 files: Path style method or Virtual hosted style method or CNAME method. After reading the article, I though that the CNAME style method will be better for my needs.

XCache installation on Ubuntu via Amazon AWS - Trial and Error

I didn't find any way to solve the s3fs 403 error which I had encountered when trying to make Amazon S3 bucket as a drive on EC2. I have decided to continue my efforts to improve the manageability and performance of my IP.Board by implementing a caching mechanism to speed up my forum and save bandwidth. I have posted a ticket to IPB support, asking them which is the most recommended caching script for Invision Power scripts. Of course the first thing I did was asking IPS support, whether IP.Board already has a caching mechanism, and the answer was No, there isn't.

Real time web analytics and Content personalization - Meet Personyze

If you are interested in information about cloud computing, you probably have an Internet application or a website which you host somewhere. Today I want to talk about Personyze site personalization tools. I've been always amazed by the sophisticated web analytic tools that we have today. As a website owner I've used several web analytics software like Google, Woopra, StatCounter, GetClicky and others. I must admit that I didn't quite take advantage of the advanced features that GA offered that time, and especially GA latest features (e.g. custom reports, advanced segmentation, etc.). Everything had changed since I tried Personyze Real-time web analytics.

Endless Computing Resources - Amazon, Google & Microsoft in the Cloud

A few years ago if you wanted to host your website, you had a few options: shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server or even host it on your own machines. Whether the servers were rented or bought, there was still something missing. Scalability is one of the most important advantages of cloud hosting. Before cloud computing technology emerged, website owners needed to come up with their own server scalability infrastructure, which will satisfy their large visitor's traffic and ever growing need for computing resources.
The main problem with that solution was that it was very expensive. You might think that when your website climbs in the traffic scale, you get enough money (selling products, ads, affiliate, etc.) to afford yourself the needed scalable computing resource infrastructure. In reality, it did work in some way, but again, the price was way to high for many. It seems that you are working very hard to earn money from your website and when your website succeeds in getting traffic, you need to shell out a lot of money for high traffic hosting solutions.

Getting to root shell in your SSH client using sudo command

When you first connect to your Amazon EC2 instance using SSH client, you might be logged in as the default user. I have found out that some applications installation and server configuration requires me to be logged in as root. When I use WinSCP to connect to my server, I have created a login session via WinSCP (free SFTP, FTP and SCP client for windows). In the WinSCP login session window, I entered: Host name, port number, user name and Private key file.
When I installed my Ubuntu AMI, it already came with a pre-defined user account. I use that account together with my Amazon Private key file to access my server.

Paid and Free Pre-configured Amazon AMI for Easy deployment

In this article I want to discuss about paid and free pre-configured Amazon AMI templates. With Amazon Web Services you have the ability to deploy different Amazon Machine Images. When I signed up for Amazon Free Tier, I knew that I can deploy an Amazon EC2 Micro instance for free. What I didn't know is that there are some Amazon AMI that are actually costs money and are not part of the Amazon Free Tier program.  As a curious person, I was trying several AMIs with different Linux operating systems. I tried Ubuntu AMIs, Amazon Linux AMIs, Suse Linux, RedHar and others.

AWS easy backup facilities and EC2 Server deployment

One of the reasons I've chosen Amazon Web Services was also due to the easy backup facilities and functionality. Prior to using AWS, I hosted my websites on VPS, shared hosting and dedicated servers. After reading about AMIs and EBS snapshots, I've decided that I must start learning to use cloud computing services. The first thing I've done was signing up to Amazon Web Services with my Amazon account. One of the reasons that I did it was because Amazon gave me a 1-year free Micro Instance trial (AWS Free Usage Tier). I though to myself that I have nothing to lose and this is a great chance to try AWS for free and test their services. The free usage tier started at November 1. If you are just starting out with Cloud hosting, I highly recommend trying AWS.

A Newbie Cloud Computing Blog has been Initialized

This is my second week using AWS. Yes, I am a newbie. In fact, I have decided to open this blog in order to summarize my experience with Amazon Web Services. I have encountered many difficulties when I first tried managing my own EC2 instance. I wanted to use Amazon AWS as a web hosting for some of my new websites. I read about the advantages of Amazon Web Services, and I have decided that it's worth the effort. The learning curve is not easy as I thought it would be. It took me one day to learn how to use SSH client to communicate with my EC2 instance.

404 Not Found when installing IP.Board - chmod 644 and 755

For those of you who are installing Invision Power Board on Amazon Cloud, I have a few things that I want to share with you. I have decided to install IP.Board on Amazon EC2 in order to enjoy the scalability functionality that cloud hosting offers. After I configured my Ubuntu 10.10 EC2 + EBS AMI server to support MySQL + PHP + Apache, I had problems accessing my installation script. In order to run IP.Board installation you will need to access it via the main domain name or via /admin/install path. When I did put the URL in the browser, the server returned with an 404 Not Fount error.

Associate Elastic IP address after stopping an EC2 Instance

If you have created an EC2 instance, you should know that when you click the "Stop" in the "Instance Lifecycle" menu, your Elastic IP address is released. When you turn on your EC2 instance by clicking "Start", you EC2 instance will start, but than you need to associate you Elastic IP again. To do so, you will need to associate your Amazon Elastic IP again, so you your domain/subdomain mapping will be able to point to your EC2 instance as before.

s3fs HTTP: 403 Forbidden error when mounting S3 bucket [SOLVED]

Today I was have decided to make Amazon S3 my primary upload drive.  I have decided to use Amazon S3 instead of EBS for storing user files which are uploaded through my IP.Board forum. From what I've read on Amazon, S3 provides me an unlimited storage space for storing files. EBS on the other hand, has a limit size and can be deployed up to 1TB. Because I intend to allow my forum members to upload large image files, I know that this space will be filled quite fast.