AWS EC2 Instance Types per Region or Local Zone

After completing my recent post, “What Is The Size And Scope Of AWS Anyway?” I stumbled across another interesting metric to compare one region to another across AWS – EC2 instance types offered per region. While attempting to launch a test EC2 instance into a local zone I was getting a rather unuseful error message […]

What is the Size and Scope of AWS Anyway?

Admittedly this is a bit of a loaded question. There are certainly a number of metrics by which something like this can be measured – gross revenue; number of employees; percent of market share; services/products offered; infrastructure footprint; and so on. By all accounts AWS is the “biggest” of all cloud providers and a quick […]

Recover From 120 Day Terminal Services Eval Time Bomb in Windows Servers on EC2

I’ve always been frustrated by Windows messages like, “please see your administrator. . .”  I AM the administrator, I don’t need to see myself, I need useful information to lead me in the right direction to troubleshoot and correct a problem. Here’s a new one that really frustrated me this week.  I have several Amazon […]

What is the Maximum Drives for an EC2 Windows Instance? – EBS Volume Limit

Yesterday while I was doing some performance testing on Amazon EBS (elastic block storage) volumes attached to a Windows AMI (Amazon machine instance) I ran into an unanticipated issue – the maximum number of drives associated with an EC2 Windows server was lower than I expected.  The max connected drives is 12 – this includes […]

Ping Amazon EC2 Server Instances – How To

By default Amazon EC2 instances don’t respond to ICMP requests, i.e. ping.  Of course there are several reasons why one may want to ping an Amazon EC2 instance, including verifying if it is online and to test latency.  As with most things there is more than one approach to this issue. First, you could enable […]

Amazon S3 Command Line Utilities for Windows

I’ve searched high and low for a good all around command line utility to interact with Amazon S3 buckets from Windows.  While I’m still searching for just the right utility for me here are a few which I use from time-to-time.   Why use more than one, you ask?  Well, since I haven’t found just […]

Windows 2008 Server on Amazon’s EC2 – a First Look

Within a couple hours of Amazon’s announcement of the availability of Windows 2008 machine images (AMI’s) on their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) platform a few days ago I had to give it a try – see my previous post, “Amazon EC2 Now Offers Windows Server 2008 – Finally!” I used RightScale to locate and launch […]

Amazon EC2 Now Offers Windows Server 2008 – Finally!

I opened my email this morning and much to my pleasure I found this announcement from Amazon: Amazon EC2 Now Offers Windows Server 2008 Starting today, Amazon EC2 now offers Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server® Standard 2008 instances in all Amazon EC2 Regions. This new announcement extends Amazon EC2’s existing Microsoft-based offerings […]

Amazon Announces Consolidation of Windows AMIs on EC2

Amazon EC2 no longer differentiates between Amazon EC2 running Windows and Amazon EC2 running Windows with Authentication Services. New and existing Windows instances can now run Authentication Services, such as LDAP and Kerberos, at no additional charge. Additionally, any currently running Windows with Authentication Services instances are now charged the same price as Windows instances. […]

Connecting to Amazon AWS from Windows to a Linux AMI

Connecting from Windows to a Linux Server poses problems for the average person to connect, and use their Windows OS to connect to the Linux Server. For some this is enough to put off people from jumping in, or banging their head against the wall wondering why you cannot simply RDP into the server and […]