Using Amazon EC2 services

Question

I planning to start a simple web based project and each person in the system will have some data stored on their account like comments and other info. The system will do basic select and update queries on the stored data. I want to use Amazon EC2 to achieve this however I am a bit confused where to get started and which service of EC2 I should use. Their web site (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) is a bit confusing. Can anyone give me some helpful information on this? Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Choose an application from here:

http://aws.amazon.com/ecommerce-applications/

Look on the left hand side under "AWS Solutions"

The API javadocs:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSJavaSDK/latest/javadoc/index.html

Other documentation (depending on what packages you plan on using)

http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/

You can also choose PHP, mobile, Python, Ruby and .NET from the left hand side under "Developer Centers"

Answer 2

At it's roots, EC2 is just a VPS provider. You get ssh access to your "box" which may run windows or some flavor of linux. From there you can install anything you want. You can use an EBS (Elastic Block Store) backed machine image so that the stuff you write is persistent. The persistent drive is mounted on your virtual machine. With that configuration you can install everything on one machine if you so desire, or install the database on one instance and the web server on another.

If you are developing in Java you can use their Elastic Beanstalk , which basically takes care of all of the machine maintenance/upkeep and just gives you a Tomcat instance to deploy to. For database when using Beanstalk you can use RDS which I believe is based on MySql.

Once you are comfortable with what you are doing in EC2, you can start looking at cloudwatch for alarms (high cpu load, high IO load, server down, etc.) Elastic Load Balancer for distributing load across multiple web servers, S3 for storing files or backups, etc.