S3 Lab-

 

For this lab we will demonstrate the ease of hosting static content in S3.

This should not take very long and is very easy, just follow the steps below or watch the video located here http://www.modelmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/DePaul-S3-Lab.swf

1.     Open a web browser and go to http://www.freewebsitetemplates.com/ here we will select a free website to get started with, for this demo I will choose the travel template. Select the template site you want to use and download it to you computer.

2.     Unzip the download.

3.     Log into aws.amazon.com and navigate to the S3 page.

4.     In the S3 tab create a bucket. I will use demos3 as the bucket name.

5.     Select the bucket you just created

6.     Now right click in the Objects and Folders section and choose upload, in the upload manager window highlight the 3 files index.html, style.css and travel.psd then hit open.

7.     Now in the Upload Files window at the bottom right click start upload. You should see a progress bar in the transfer’s section and the files should show up in the Objects and Folders screen.

8.     Now click the create a folder button, when the new folder pops up name it exactly as the name of the folder that was in the zip file you downloaded, I will use images.

9.     Now double click on the images folder to open it.

10.   In the images folder click the Upload button.

11.   In the upload window click inside the images folder and select all the files in it, then hit the start upload button.

12.   You should see files appear in the images bucket.

13.   Now navigate back to the bucket you created, mine was demos3

14.   Now hight light the index.html object and right click to get to the properties.

15.   In the properties you should see 3 tabs- Details, Permissions and Metadata. Lets look at Metadata for the index.html file.

16.   The S3 console is pretty good at recognizing the files and we want to make sure it is Key: Content-Type Value:text/html

17.   Now click back on details and copy the link and paste it into a web browser, what do you see? It should look like this AccessDeniedAccess Denied80EDC005228C118A4ptOunASFW/ER0Q6QxM52ohdqdmtHuLFrbMlX+skwNS8IcEvGl+BcLxHjdPkdUN6

18.   Now lets select all four objects in the bucket and right click and select make public.

19.   Now try the link again, what do you see? A website with images? If no, we need to go into the images folder and make all images public.

20.    Now remember to delete all the stuff you added or you will be charged.

 

Today Amazon made a couple of interesting announcements.  First off they have opened a new region (Northern California) with multiple availability zones (analogous to data centers, but each on separate flood plains and electrical grids).  This further increases their computing capacity and also puts data closer to all of the start-up’s in the Bay area that rely on Amazon.  The also have a US-East region, EU region and will have regions in Asia in 2010.

The key announcement however centers around some changes and enhancements to EC2 (their virtualized computing layer).  One of the main criticisms and design challenges with EC2 has been around the fact that when you shut down a server, the state of that server is lost (unlike VMWare).  There were ways around it (such as storing all data on EBS (analogous to a mounted drive on your virtual instance), but it did present some challenges.  Today they announced the availability to save server state with a new Stop command, which unlike Terminate, saves the state of that running server.

This feature is enabled because you can also now boot from EBS, instead of S3.  This leads to a faster boot time, and also makes it easier to tune your kernel or make other changes to an image.  Upon boot you can also mount multiple EBS volumes which can lead to some very robust configurations.

Another challenge of EC2 was creating an image (AMI) of a server once you had it set up.  This was fairly easy for a windows instance (using the Bundle process) but was more difficult for a Linux instance.  Now you can use the CreateImage command to create a new AMI and register it in one easy step.  See all the details here.

These are great enhancements to EC2 and are a welcome addition to the AWS offering.