Put Your Servers in the Cloud with Amazon EC2 and Ubuntu

Bill Childers — Mon, 03 May 2010 20:39:10 +0000

Cloud services are all the rage today, although some of my fellow Linux Journal staffers may scoff when they hear me say that. Cloud services is a nebulous term that can mean anything from completely hosted services (like Gmail) to virtualized, leased servers, such as those provided by Amazon's EC2 service. And, the latter is the subject of this article. Recently, with the advent of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), Canonical has added support for pre-baked Amazon EC2 images. This makes spinning up your own personal cloud servers fast and easy—although not necessarily economical (see the Amazon EC2 Economics sidebar for a quick cost breakdown of EC2).

The Ubuntu EC2 Starters Guide (see Resources) should be your first stop. This document guides you through the process of creating your own EC2 instance. Before you can do anything at all with EC2, you need to set up an Amazon EC2 account. Go to the URL listed in the Resources section, and either sign in with your existing Amazon account or create a new one. Then, click on the EC2 link and sign up for the EC2 service. You need to provide a credit card for billing purposes. Once you've done that, select the Create an X.509 Certificate link that's presented on the thank-you page. Select yes to create a new certificate, and then download your certificate and private key to your hard disk. Finally, make a note of your AWS account ID number, as you may need it later.

Now that you've got your Amazon account and are enrolled in the EC2 program, it's time to start installing the management tools on your local system. If you're running Ubuntu, simply type sudo apt-get install ec2-api-tools to download the EC2 management tools. You also need the Sun 1.6 JDK (installable via sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk). If you're using another distro or Mac OS X, you can get the toolset by following the link in the Resources section of this article. The tools are nothing more than a .zip file full of Java binaries and shell scripts, so they're fairly portable.

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