Posts Tagged ‘ec2’

Hey folks! You won’t be able to see this for a while, but it’s so awesome I can’t not write this RIGHT NOW! So BRBcoffee has moved around quite a bit, and even changed names every now and again, but this is by far the best relocation to date! Guess from whence your magical computing device is currently furiously fetching packages at almost the speed of light! Go on, guess, I’ll wait.
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It’s my own server! Kinda. Did you guess right? Ok, ok, just let me explain. It’s not actually my own physical computer, that would be silly of me, my home server is only up about 80% of the time, and is vulnerable to all kinds of failures, never mind the fact that I break the software on it all the time. My computer/server is my tinkerbox, it’s where I’ve learned all the awesome computer stuff that I know, so there’s no way I’d let web traffic crash it. But if it’s not really my server, how can it be my server, you ask? Well, there’s this magical thing called cloud computing, and Amazon’s kind is the best.

Enter Amazon Web Services

You know, me and Amazon, we’re cool. These are the things I like about Amazon:

  1. They’ve got the Kindle store, which is pretty cool.
  2. They’ve got that whole delivery thing going for them. I’ve used it, like, once.
  3. They’ve got an app store. I guess that’s ok.
  4. Uh, their logo looks like a smiley face?
  5. FRIGGIN Amazon Web Services, man!

And here are the things Amazon likes about me:

  1. My money

Okay, so it’s not a very balanced relationship, but hey,what can you do? Anyway, they’ve got this thing called Amazon Web Services, which I’ve known about for a while now, but never really started using, because even though I knew it wasn’t all that expensive, it just seemed like I didn’t have the needs that mandated cashing out for their services. Turns out they have a free tier that lasts for a whole year! And what’s this free tier like? Lots of ads, limited to no functionality, the usual shazam, right? Not at all! I have not seen a single ad thus far, and with the free tier, you can:

  1. Run up to two micro Could Computing Instances (EC2)
  2. Have up to 30GB of persistent Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
  3. Reserve one elastic ip (read: static ip), free for life!
  4. Run all kinds of operating systems on your EC2 instances
  5. Run the instances for 750 hours a month! (That’s 31 days, or all month long baby!)
  6. Lots of other stuff I don’t even know what does yet!

So that’s what I’m doing now. The learning curve is kinda steep, took me about two days to figure out enough to get this stuff working, and a lot of trial and error. RIP all you failed EC2 instances, I’m sorry for my incompetence. Anyhoo, how about when the free trial ends, you ask? Well, I done crunched the numbers, and it comes out to like ten bucks or so, and that’s supposing I don’t come up with a clever caching method to keep stuff from being read from the permanent storage as much as possible.

Now, it’s not like I’d do all this just so I could have complete control over my website (I totally would, actually), oh no, there’s much more to it. See, what you see is this website. What I see is my own server pushing out my own content. Pretty sweet, but allow me to underline the important part there. What I see is my own server pushing out my own content. It’s basically a nice little box with ridiculous bandwidth and impossibly fast disk access running GNU/Linux, and I can do whatever I want with it. So what have I got it doing for me, besides serving up this website? Well, it’s a git server, for one. My source code is scattered around the web, because different projects called for different services. Now all I have to do is install a Linux package or two, and I’ve got the service I need, all coming out of one place, namely supercharged BRBcoffee.com. I know unauthorized people won’t be able to peek at my stuff, because people I don’t explicitly allow aren’t even able to reach the login screen. I’ll sure as hell be using it as a vpn when I’m on public wifi, the speed hit will hardly be noticeable. I’ll be serving all kinds of appdata from here when my apps start popping up in the Play Store. It’s everything and anything I want it to be, and that’s the beauty of it!

I think that’s enough gushing for one night, and I gotta get up soon. In the meantime, you go check out AWS, and start your free trial.

Oh, what am I talking about, you won’t even be able to read this until the DNS refreshes.

Song of the blog: You know, I didn’t even listen to music while I wrote this, but have my new favorite song anyway. 君に願いを

Admin out.

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