amazon ec2 rocks

OK - I've drunk the kool-aide. I messed around with EC2 this week. And I have to say that it blows away any other hosting service that I have ever seen.

So far I've been running an AMI from alestic. Apparently there are some rouge AMIs out there which have rootkits or some such nonsense, but these look legit. It is a big step forward from the Fedora Core 7 instance I had on godaddy.

I've also setup my S3 storage with a few buckets. One is just a public bucket that I plan on using for storage related to the various blogs that I maintain or post to. I've even used a bucket to customize the alestic 9.04 ubuntu AMI with my own updates. Now I just need to setup some persistent storage that I can mount as a drive from within my instance, and I will be in business.

Well that and there is some annoying Tomcat 6 issue that I am hitting. For some reason some of my servlets are not being found. I'm pretty sure that my ajp configuration from apache isn't the problem, but I've tried several different web.xml values for the servlet's URL mappings. I can run the app, and my login and logout servlets hit fine. But the servlets that I have for hitting gwt based remote services aren't flying. Ergh.

Oh and I've got an "elastic" IP address. It is really a neat idea. Instead of having to muck with A Records, you can quickly repoint the public IP address to various instances on your account. All in all, it really does rock!