super-good!

A few more spots opened up in the Amazon EC2 beta program yesterday and I grabbed one of them. I spent a couple of hours playing with it while the other nerds still around at work were literally crying out with excitement over their new iPhones (which are indeed amazing).

I went through the tutorials and then, with a helpful blog post and script I put together a Fedora 7 machine image. One slight change I made to Carson’s script was to point the yum configuration to a loopback-mounted F7 DVD ISO. This was especially easy because Red Hat set up the DVD as a prepared yum repository, so there was no need to copy the DVD’s files and run createrepo on them.

Building the image this way was really fast, and uploading the resulting bundle was fast too (thanks to the speed of Pixar’s network connection in the off hours).

I have to say that I was genuinely excited when I first saw that EC2 had booted my image and assigned it an address. The root prompt that I logged into was no different than any others I’d seen, but knowing what was behind it set my nerd thoughts racing.

At first it seemed to me that this would be the perfect way to host my wee blog and source repositories. SteelPixel is fine so far, but for some reason it’s taken a dislike to my desktop machine at work, dropping all of its packets. All of my other machines work without trouble. That tiny annoyance was spurring my hopes that EC2 would become the cheap, nimble host of my nerdly dreams—and then I did the math. Running one EC2 instance for a month would wind up costing more than $70. Poop!

EC2 still has tons of potential, though, and I’m looking forward to poking at it more. All of these cheap new technologies (from Amazon and elsewhere, especially ZFS from Sun) are making it an exciting time to be a big nerd.