[merge] documentation on building/testing/packaging on ec2

[Martin Pool]

2009/2/20 John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com>:
> Martin Pool wrote:
>
> Certainly I like to have this sort of documentation brought in. Though I
> have to say setting up an EC2 account seems rather difficult. And you
> don't even have documentation for how to set it up from a Windows machine.
>
> It certainly seems quite a bit trickier than "rdesktop $SHARED_HOST",
> and being able to get stuff done.
>
> I'm willing to live with this, especially if you've already done the
> bulk of the setup phase, but I did think it was worth commenting on.
>
> Especially, the requirement for each person to have their own Amazon
> account, and it being rather unclear how to use a shared-account.

I was pondering the same thing myself by the time I finished writing it.

I like the fact that it is a "real" virtual machine and so, unlike the
previous setup, something like installing system updates should not
break it.  It's nice too that we can make a system image and revert
back to it if something does go wrong.  I'm also observing much better
network connectivity there, and for you in the US it will be better
again.  Also apparently the Launchpad developers are quite happy with
using it to run Ubuntu instances for testing.

Beyond the complexity of getting it going there's also the
consideration that just getting it started takes several minutes --
longer than it would typically take Windows to boot, I guess because
it has to copy the data onto a machine to run it.

It may be better not to worry about shutting the machine down and just
to leave it running all the time.  That would cost about $90/month
which is comparable to the cost of Kerguelen and not so much that it's
worth spending a lot of developer time to reduce it.  Then for most of
the time, people would just be able to connect in using rdesktop.  We
may still need to restart it if the physical machine that it's on
fails but that should be rare, but people wouldn't need to create
accounts unless they wanted to do this.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>