Creating and Persisting an AMI

This lab went pretty good. It wasn’t difficult at all, as long as you knew what you were doing. I spent a considerable amount of time understanding what the lab was supposed to do, and I don’t think I got it until I read the first few chapters of the O’Riley’s book “Programming Amazon Web Services”.
Once I understood the idea of Amazon web services, it was much clearer as to what I needed to do, and so I was able to complete the lab without much obstacles.

After I started an instance of a preconfigured AMI, I went ahead and installed all the software that I thought I will need for my AMI to have whenever I boot it up. Since I persited my AMI based on a Fedora Core OS, I just used ‘yum’ to install the packages such as java, mysql, python, modpython, boto, php, httpd, and some others.

Then I created a boostrapping script that would deploy my locally developed code to the AMI.  I wrote the sample “Hello, World” web page in PHP, just to make sure my server on the cloud works properly, and used python for the bootstrapping script.

CS 462 – Large-Scale Distributed System Design

This class (coded as CS 462) at BYU is a project-oriented class, where we will be spending the entire semester building a large scale distributed system based on the Amazon.com web services. The system we will be building, is a photo-sharing web site where users can view/post pictures, make comments, and rate the pictures.

So far, the class has been fascinating, especially that it is being taught by one of the pioneers of online applications and someone who has vast experience with building large scale systems. It has been a joy attending the lectures from Dr. Phil Windley as we discuss very interesting issues regarding distributed systems.

The labs on this class are structured so that each piece can work as a standalone part of the distributed system, and as each lab is implemented, it will be integrated with the rest of the system. By the end of the class, we will have a complete working distributed system by integrating all six labs.