Guy Tel-Zur's Blog

    When introducing Cloud Computing (CC) people usually like to emphasize the similarities between Electric Power Grids (EPG) and CC.     These analogies include: On demand service, Pay-Per-Use (PPU) model, the Elasticity of the resources, load balancing and even water cooling,     After the Amazon EC2 service disruption on April 21 st , 2011, we can identify more similarities between EPG and CC in disasters related issues. These similarities include: 1. A global damage (with immediate and delayed components). 2. Uncontrolled behavior of the resources (neutron population vs. loss of connectivity or fuel rods meltdown vs. failing servers). 3. During the crisis, similar announcements to the public which minimize the catastrophe. 4. After the crisis, publication of the event investigation in length. 5. Loss of confidence in the technology by the users.

Why???? (click on the image to enlarge)

Next time you will need computing resources, e.g. a web server, get it from the cloud, it is simple and easy! This post is not meant to be a full tutorial but only a brief description of my own personal experience playing with Amazon EC2. For more complete information about working with Amazon EC2 check this or this references or browse here for additional documentation Step 1: Create an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) account. Pricing and additional information is available here . Step 2: Download the Amazon command line API tools and/or install the Elasticfox - Firefox plug-in . Step 3: Set the security keys to allow SSH. Step 4: Configure the Elasticfox (for example open port 22 for SSH and port 80 for http in my case). Step 5. I used one of the pre-configured Amazon Machine Images (AMI), therefore starting the machine was immediate. Step 6: Enjoy the new virtual machine - see screen shots below: Figure 1: The Amazon Elasticfox GUI. Figure 2: Connecting to the machine via S...