Jumping on the Amazon EC2 Cloud

I've been meaning to try out Amazon's EC2 cloud for a while. I had been looking at tools that make it easy to deploy Java web applications for the cloud like Cloud Foundry or even Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk, but I thought I should get more familiar with deploying cloud applications myself before using tools that abstract some of the basics away from you.

Yesterday I spent an afternoon and was able to configure the following:

• Launched a virtual instance of a linux distro.


• Installed and configured Apache Tomcat.


• Installed a sample web application on Tomcat.


• Assigned my instance an IP address.


• Mapped a domain to point at the IP address.


• Configured SSL.

...and presto! I have an application running on my EC2 instance that uses SSL:

https://www.doulosdev.com/directory/
(NOTE: Might not be up at this moment as I will be bringing it up-and-down!)

I still need to hammer out some kinks (e.g. allow regular HTTP traffic, configure the "www" subdomain, etc.), but not too bad for a cloud n00b! :-)

In summary, take Amazon EC2 out for a spin.