JamesBranam's Blog

AWS Experience Part 1: Setting up the Tools

Hi all,

I've just been reassigned (partially) to make sense of using a MySQL database server in the cloud, namely in Amazon Web Services. I'll be blogging about my experiences. Today is part 1.

After creating the account, I got to work. I signed up for EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud 2), Simple Storage, and EBS (storage that allows for persistence). I played around with starting an instance, terminating it, etc. Then I got started with the command line tools. This is what I did.

• I made sure that my JAVA_HOME was set correctly in my mac: I typed

  export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home/

  in the terminal. Then I typed

  $JAVA_HOME/bin/java -version

  to confirm that the JAVA_HOME was indeed set correctly.
• Then I made created a .ec2 directory in my home directory. I then added my private key and X.509 certificate to this directory. I also made sure to point to these locations

  export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ec2/pk-123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP.pem
  export EC2_CERT=~/.ec2/cert-(98765F43dFMPONUBYGSFATAJAAJJU5SG.pem

• Then I made sure I was pointing to my EC2_HOME:

  export EC2_HOME=/Users/jb/ec2-api-tools-1.3-34128/

I was in business. In the terminal, I went to my ec2/bin folder and tried out a few commands. They didn't work. However, when I added

./

before each command, they did work. I was able to contact AWS. Wow.

I'll write more tomorrow.

Cheers!

--James

Posted at 02:40PM May 12, 2009 by branajam in NetBeans  |  Comments[1]