ec2

You can’t pick up a technical magazine, hang out on Twitter, or read an article on a technology blog without hearing the phrase:  Cloud Computing.  What is cloud computing?  Wikipedia defines it as “Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand“.  That definition is pretty good, but what does it actually mean? Cloud Computing provides businesses and consumers the ability to create on-demand resources and pay only for what you’re using. In the case of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Rackspace Cloud servers (or Instances as they call them) you can very quickly provision yourself a server, meeting your personal requirements, use it for a period of...

Update – 20160625 After assisting a reader I realized I should probably post an update to this article.  When I wrote it, Amazon AWS did not have a “Create Image” capability.  Some time ago this was introduced.  The steps below should still work, but they are cumbersome and should be replaced with the following steps: Select your Instance on the AWS Console Click the Actions button Select Image >Create Image Yep, it’s now that easy.  You can also use Bundle AMI on a non-running instance if you wish to upload an AMI to the store.  Keep in mind that if you create an image of a running instance it will not be crash consistent and could have data issues. Original...