Alexey Bokov's weblog » Amazon EC2

Interesting links ( June/July 2010 )

Alexey Bokov — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:09:27 +0000

Configuring Ubuntu ( 9.10 ) to work with Amazon EC2

Alexey Bokov — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:45:56 +0000

Short how-to about configuring Ubuntu to work with EC2 API ( for Ubuntu 10.04 users – Sun JDK was moved to partner repository so please check out Where’s sun JDK on Ubuntu 10.04 ? before follow described steps ).

1) Remove openjdk, gij
sudo apt-get remove openjdk-*;
sudo apt-get remove gij-*;

2) Install good one java powered by Sun
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

3) Install EC2 API
cd /home/abokov/

http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip

unzip ec2-api-tools.zip

4) Configure environment : add this lines onto the end of ~/.bashrc
#ec2 deal with stuff
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
# setting up Amazon EC2
export EC2_HOME=/home/abokov/ec2-api-tools-1.3-30349
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin:
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=/home/abokov/keys/pk-XXX.pem
export EC2_CERT=/home/abokov/keys/cert-XXX.pem

export EC2_ACCESS_KEY_ID=***
export EC2_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=***

You may check out how it works using ec2-describe-instances.

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Amazon Web Services links – October/November 2009

Alexey Bokov — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:11:26 +0000

Update in Amazon Web Services:

2 high cpu instance types : 64 bits – Double Extra Large с 34.2 GB RAM, and 13 ECU (4 virtual cores *3.25 EC2 compute Unit=ECU), 64-bit platform
and Quadruple Extra Large – 68.4 GB of RAM/ 26 ECU (8 virtual cores* 3.25 ECU) : New EC2 High-Memory Instances

Instance prices changes ( us-east is still cheaper thatn eu-west ) : Amazon EC2 – Now an Even Better Value

New service for relational DB ( provisioning, scaling and other nice things ) : Introducing Amazon RDS – The Amazon Relational Database Service

Security stuff : Vulnerability identified in Amazon’s cloud computing

Amazon EC2 – Ubuntu at google groups

5 years ago Amazon announced Amazon Simple Queue Service – top points of AWS for last 5 years

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SGE 6.2u4 – new update from Regensburg

Alexey Bokov — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:01:23 +0000

If anyone interested in it – here’s new update for Sun Grid Engine 6.2 – update 4. It almost about bug fixing and man’s changes – list of changes is here. Sources’ tag for CVS is V62u4_TAG (make sense for Grid Engine, ARCo, SGE Inspect ), by the way as I know Hedeby is still 1.0u3.

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Comparing goGrid with Amazon EC2

Alexey Bokov — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:37:17 +0000

Public cloud providers : hybrid cloud vs instance types, API logging vs stability – comparing goGrid and Amazon EC2 .GoGrid is officially out of beta, so now it’s time to compare GoGrid with the public cloud market leader, Amazon EC2. Both vendors have relatively stable performance metrics and they both implement the basic functionality of a cloud provider:

Programmatic control via REST API
Scalable data storage solution: Elastic Block Storage in Amazon AWS and CloudStorage in GoGrid
Ability to assign external IP addresses
Ability to grant root/administrator credentials
Many options to configure the cloud cluster
Windows and Linux support
Web console for monitoring and management

So far, as cloud providers GoGrid and Amazon EC2 look very similar, but practical experience of using them in real-life projects helps us identify some unique features that can be important for specific applications – for highlighed features and bad points for both providers look onto GoGrid is out of beta on Grid Designer’s Blog

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Cloud providers perfomance tests and monitoring

Alexey Bokov — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:47:10 +0000

Cloud links for August

Alexey Bokov — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:06:06 +0000

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Quick steps to configure Ubuntu for with EC2 API

Alexey Bokov — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:28:00 +0000

Here’s some steps which I frequently use to configure Ubuntu to work as EC2 manager
1) Remove all non sun’s java – openjdk, gij

apt-get uninstall openjdk-*

apt-get uninstall gij-*

2) And install java from sun
apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

3) Install EC2 API
cd /home/abokov/

http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip

unzip ec2-api-tools.zip

4) Configure environment : I just add lines below to my ~/.bashrc
#ec2 deal with stuff
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
# setting up Amazon EC2
export EC2_HOME=/home/abokov/ec2-api-tools-1.3-30349
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin:
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=/home/abokov/keys/pk-XXX.pem
export EC2_CERT=/home/abokov/keys/cert-XXX.pem

export EC2_ACCESS_KEY_ID=***
export EC2_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=***

It’s should be ready – you may check it out by run in terminal :

ec2-describe-instances.

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Using SDM to managing OpenSolaris zones

Alexey Bokov — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:03:44 +0000

Sun Grid Engine’s top engineer Richard Hierlmeier wrote article ( and some bash scripts which implements it – btw why you not to put it them onto your cvs? ) about using SDM in compute cloud ( here’s EC2 as example, I suppose that GoGrid can be used also without too many changes ) – Using SDM Cloud Adapter to Manage Solaris Zones.

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New version of Sun Grid Engine

Alexey Bokov — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:52:32 +0000

Sun released new version of Sun Grid Engine – 6.2 Update 3. That’s new:

Amazon EC2 adapter – SDM Cloud Service Adapter now is avaialable to scale SGE cluster in EC2 – they only need to have OpenVPN installed on instances, and special configuration for IP addresses ( SGE is still very picky about DNS ) – more about restriction is here and here’s bash scripts which used for EC2 deployment. By the way I see that OpenSolaris is still only one OS which available for SGE on EC2, if you’re looking for some SGE/EC2 solutions you may check out Convergence proejct which deal with SGE/GemFire cluster installation on EC2 – see Installing SGE on EC2, or Hedeby installation on EC2.
Now only one JVM can be runned on master or managed host – in previous version SGE ran 3 JVM on every host – one for cs_vm ( configuration service ), executor_vm ( executor component ) and rp_vm ( resource provider ). In SGE terminology it called SDM simple install.
Now SGE have Exclusive Scheduling – this helps to guarantee predictable performance and to avoid interference when a job is not using all of the slots that are available on a host
Sun declared that now SGE have Microsoft Vista Support ( don’t think that there’s too much SGE installations on Vista ) and also some usual marking speech about Power Saving features

upd. Also there’s new Sun Studio 12 Update 1 is available too.

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