[ec2-beta] ec2 concepts and understanding

[Darryl]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 2:57 AM, Jim Cheetham <jim at inode.co.nz> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Darryl <smartssa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm just wondering about how persistent these instances are supposed to be
> > on the EC2 cloud.
>
> An AMI is a read-only "image" of a machine. In itself it doesn't do
> anything, and doesn't run. It's just the equivalent of files on a
> disk.
>
> An 'instance' is a running virtual machine. An instance starts with an
> AMI, and the equivalent of being "switched on" and booted from disk.
>
> An instance lives in EC2 memory only. There is no permanent storage
> associated with it, unless you configure EBS or S3 specifically for
> it. The filesystems that you see in an instance are virtual; they will
> still be there if you reboot your instance, but once you stop it,
> Amazon releases the whole associated memory, and the instance is lost.

Thank you Jim, that makes the whole scenario clear.

Now I have an idea as to how to use this thing.

--
~ Darryl  ~ smartssa at gmail.com
~ http://darrylclarke.com