[ec2-beta] Equivilant VM appliances?

[Darren Govoni]

Yeah, it dawned on me that was best, so now that I have my install
script working like a charm (I just upload it after initial boot), its
easy for me to stand-up and tear-down instances.

In fact, to get my install script working, I would stand-up successive
instances as I debugged the script, tearing down the previous one and
got it working in a fraction of the time the old way. Couldn't even
think how this would be done quickly with virtualization....eck!

btw, my technique for config/install of a new instance is to install
subversion, pull down the other install scripts and run those. keeps the
user-data script (soon to be working from launch I trust) small.

any tweaks I make to the real scripts, I commit back to subversion and
repeat. In case anyone is looking to do this.

On Mon, 2009-01-12 at 13:57 -0800, Eric Hammond wrote:
> Darren:
> 
> It depends a bit on what your application does and what you are testing.
>    It should be possible to build a near-identical image using the
> vmbuilder in development.
> 
> There are parts of the EC2 environment which are difficult to replicate
> (though I've heard good things about the Eucalyptus project in this
> regard if you have spare hardware that you want to turn into an EC2 clone).
> 
> The cool thing about EC2 is that it's easy and cheap to do your testing
> there.  Fire up an instance, try things out, and shut it down when the
> test is done for a total cost often well under a dollar.
> 
> Plus, if things go wrong, you start up a fresh instance so you're always
> testing from a clean install without having to worry about possibly
> missing something you tweaked manually.
> 
> --
> Eric Hammond
> ehammond at thinksome.com
> 
> 
> 
> Darren Govoni wrote:
> > Hi,
> >    Are there VMware images that mirror the AMI's? I was thinking I 'd
> > use one locally for some testing purposes before deploying into EC2.
> > 
> > Darren
> > 
> >