Author Archives: Jeremy

Don’t forget, not even private IPs persist through stop/start of AWS EC2 instance

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Well, I knew that the public DNS would not persists through a stop/start of an EC2 instance, easy enough to get around, use an Elastic IP.  I do most of my AWS work inside of a VPC, I had to step outside of that for a project setting up a web app & sql server, I used the private IP of the EC2 instance, not thinking I would need to change the instance type (small -> medium) but when I did….  🙂  no db connectivity on app server.

I do most of my work inside a VPC, my advice is to launch your instances inside a VPC, I never have figured out why I cannot change the size of an EC2 instance with a simple restart though.. thereby preserving my DNS settings.

Better still, use Route53 to setup a CNAME, point that to the internal IP of the instance and voila, still avoid the bandwidth usage and no need to modify connection strings.

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Bringing the power of AWS to my blog

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I’ve been an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) fan for some time now and I thought it would be cool to incorporate some of AWS (Amazon Web Services) into my blog, for both personal exploration and to share things I pick up along the way.

I’ve read a few different blogs about people running their WordPress instances from AWS but reading and doing our two different things and WordPress blogs are dynamic…not static pages, subsequently it becomes a little more involved.

Over the past couple years I have used AWS to run a handful of Windows/Linux servers running things like Typo3/Joomla, Bugzilla, SES, etc.. This experimentation phase for cloud adoption has lasted longer for me than say virtualizing on VMWare but what’s the rush.

Future AWS explorations:

1) My next goal is to move the static content from this blog to the cloud, which is made easy by plugins
2) Setup OpenVPN instance for personal use
3) Explore moving Exchange 2010 Edge Transport Server role to AWS
4) Setup VPC (haven’t had a need to utilize this feature yet but I would like to look into how I could take advantage of this at work)
5) Along the VPC lines, what about moving Active Directory to the cloud? I can think of a few issues off-hand but I’m sure others have thought about this.
6) How can I take advantage of AWS and use it as a platform to serve up content for unattended self-service kiosks and digital signage
6) So many other things…….

And so it begins.

Quick……To the cloud!