Let me first introduce myself, I am Mathieu, full-time open-source preacher and proud new sysadmin of this powerful MindTouch team. Today I wanted to tell you about one of my first projects here at MindTouch : Setting up Deki Wiki as an Amazon EC2 instance.

If you’re not familiar with it, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a Xen based virtual hosting solution. Among some outstanding features, we will notice its flexibility, a “pay as you go” pricing system and its virtually unlimited extension possibilities.

For Deki Wiki, an EC2 instance works pretty much the same way as the VMware appliance except for one thing : all the resources Amazon loans you for the run are volatiles, so whenever you your instance gets stopped, all your working data is lost. The workaround for that is simple : backup, backup and backup again. For that purpose you can either use “scp” to keep a local backup or preferably use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for optimal performances along with EC2.

I am currently writing a script to easily backup and restore the Deki Wiki data of an EC2 instance so you will be able to recover your data on any new Deki Wiki AMI, or also clone your server, or even launch 100 instances of your Wiki to serve your billion wiki users !!

The EC2 instance I work on is based on CentOS and I use the extended interface provided by Rightscale. Moreover the pretty interface it provides, the “RightScripts” technology from Rightscale allowed me to customize a vanilla CentOS image in a very convenient way. You should definitely have a look at it if you plan to migrate some services to EC2.

An EC2 Deki Wiki AMI (BETA) will be released soon so be sure to give it a try !

Links :
http://aws.amazon.com
http://info.rightscale.com/

Mathieu (mathieuo[at]mindtouch.com)

categories: MindTouch