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.