Posts Tagged ‘amazon’
Friday, April 16th, 2010 by Jared Peterson
We just pushed out a minor refresh to SaffronSierra. As a user you won’t notice much that’s different (hopefully). This refresh brings with it a couple of changes. One that users will see, and another they won’t. Let me talk about both briefly:
- Nightly Running Reminders – SaffronSierra is a pay-as-you-go service. You pay for every hour your service is running. SaffronSierra makes it really simple (you click a button) to start a SaffronMemoryBase system. It’s so simple in fact that it’s easy to start it and forget that it’s running. Now SaffronSierra will send email reminders every night to users who’s SaffronSierra service is running. If you actually want your service to be running 24/7 (which is totally fine by the way), and you don’t want to receive these reminders you can login and update your user profile.
- New Amazon AWS Java Libraries – SaffronSierra uses Amazon AWS as it’s backend infrastructure for running services. The java library we originally used to integrate with AWS has been deprecated. So, we ported SaffronSierra over to the new java library. This actually was a pretty painless process. There are some differences between the two libraries, but as I told someone recently “it’s different in the ways that it needs to be different.” Hopefully you won’t notice this change and things just keep humming along.
We’ll keep the updates coming, stay tuned.
Tags: amazon, development, ec2, Java, SaffronSierra
Posted in SaffronMemoryBase, SaffronSierra | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 by David Young
Version 0.1 of CL-EC2 is now available for download, under an MIT-style license. The project is hosted at common-lisp.net, and may be found here. There are several mailing lists available, and contributors are welcome.
Tags: amazon, cloudwatch, Common Lisp, ec2, lisp
Posted in SaffronSierra | No Comments »
Thursday, February 4th, 2010 by David Young
To complement our Common Lisp EC2 interface, I’ve written a similar package for Amazon’s CloudWatch, an “easy-to-use web service that provides comprehensive monitoring for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Elastic Load Balancing”. There are currently just two operations provided by CloudWatch: ListMetrics and GetMetricStatistics, both of which are supported by our new package.
The CloudWatch Lisp interface has some work remaining; mostly just parsing the responses from Amazon into more useful representations of the metrics (similar to the way we transform EC2 responses). Since GetMetricStatistics can return a lot of information, I’ll have to decide how best to represent this data in an easy-to-use, Lispy fashion. At present, the CloudWatch responses are filtered through the s-xml package and returned in a “parsed-xml” format.
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Tags: amazon, cloudwatch, lisp
Posted in SaffronSierra | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 by David Young
A few weeks back there was an interesting article describing a security breach on Amazon’s EC2 Cloud. Of particular interest is this quote:
“On another part of the Sensepost presentation, they looked specifically at vulnerabilities of Amazon’s Web Services. To start off, they detailed the process involved in setting up a new instance on EC2… While Amazon has provided 47 machine images they built themselves, the remaining 2721 images were build by other EC2 users. Can you really believe that all of these images were built securely? Basically, the template directory is just a big archive of user-generated content.”
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Tags: amazon, ec2, security
Posted in SaffronSierra | No Comments »
Friday, January 29th, 2010 by David Young
A few weeks ago I was in the “post-holiday doldrums” and needed a lift out of my rut. I was missing Lisp (hadn’t written any Lisp code in two years); was curious about the details of the EC2 API protocol; and wanted a better environment for managing our Sierra instances that fit my style of working (I’m an old system-software guy that uses Emacs and Bash a lot). So I took a couple of days and wrote an EC2 API for Common Lisp, and then built a Sierra management interface on top of that. As it turned out, there were several open-source Common Lisp packages that helped: Edi Weitz’s drakma, a tidy web client; ironclad, an easy-to-use cryptography package; s-xml, a simple xml parser; and s-base64 for simple base64 encoding/decoding. Using these packages I had a functioning EC2 interface in half a day, and by the third day the package had everything I needed to build my Sierra layer on top. The decisive advantage this approach has over my previous python command-line interface is that my Sierra environment is running all the time (Lisp within an Emacs session); and thus I am able to interact with Sierra via the Lisp REPL., make changes without having to restart my Sierra environment, etc. Very cool.
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Tags: amazon, ec2, lisp
Posted in SaffronSierra | 3 Comments »
Monday, January 18th, 2010 by David Young
We’ve begun experimenting with the creation of Sierra AMIs using Amazon’s new EBS-backed AMI machinery, which allows one to store an AMI’s root device on an EBS volume rather than in bundled format on S3.
Right now, there seems to be little useful Amazon documentation on EBS-backed AMIs; the information necessary to attempt this experiment was gathered from several blog posts. Sierra is based on custom, internally built CentOS 5.3 AMIs; since none of the posts I found were CentOS-specific, some twiddling and guesswork was involved in getting a basic EBS Sierra instance started. However, this particular blog was pretty good: http://www.elastician.com/2009/12/creating-ebs-backed-ami-from-s3-backed.html.
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Tags: amazon, ec2
Posted in SaffronSierra | No Comments »
