Chef enables you to automate your infrastructure. It provides a command line tool called knife to help you manage your configurations. Using the knife EC2 plugin you can manage your Amazon EC2 instances with Chef. knife EC2 makes it possible to create and bootstrap Amazon EC2 instances in just one line – if you go through a few setup steps. In this article, I want to show you how to setup your Chef installation and AWS configuration so that you can easily bootstrap new Amazon EC2 instances with Chef’s knife.
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Free Cloudkick Monitoring for EC2
For my final post in freely acquiring, maintaining and monitoring a virtual root server, I’d like to introduce you to Cloudkick. They’ve had a major marketing campaign going on after being acquired by the folks from Rackspace. I actually clicked through one of their ads while browsing some headlines on Slashdot.
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Migrate Your WordPress Blog to a Bitnami EC2 Instance
The cool thing about technical howtos like this is the ability to share with other folks who get just as excited. Looking to save costs on our blog hosting, Amazon’s announcement of a 12 month free usage tier put us in the short list for migration. As Matthias did the bulk of the joyent public cloud & linode migrations, it was high-time I got my hands dirty. Without further ado, here’s how I migrated AWO to our first Amazon EC2 instance. Let’s get our geek on!
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Selenium Testing in the Cloud with Sauce Labs
One small comment for Matthias, one giant leap for our testing infrastructure. In my last post about anti-fixes, I expressed my reservations about selenium test automation. Matthias mentioned the companies Sauce Labs and Cloud Testing maintained virtual test server farms so that I wouldn’t have to. Here’s why Sauce Labs made my choice super easy:
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Scalarium – Manage Your Amazon EC2 Clouds With Chef
The guys from peritor, who are the creators of webistrano, created an opscode chef based cloud management solution: Scalarium. Jonathan Weiss walked me through their solution, which helps to solve the issue of installing and dynamically configuring applications on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. In this post, I want to show you how they use chef cookbooks in a very special way to manage the lifecycle of your web application clusters.
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