I'd like to tell you about a project I have been working on. I believe deploying fully baked AMIs has so many advantages over half-baked or raw deployments where things happen at boot time, that I want to make it easy for everyone to do. Netflix have been doing ... Read more

There are many ways to build AMIs, and this episode will show you how to use the same process Netflix uses by using Aminator. We will then take it one step further, and build AMIs using the Ansible Provisioner as well.

In the lead up to AWS re:invent 2013, our open source projects have received a few updates, so I thought it best to summarize them. NetflixOSS Anisble Playbooks There are now CloudFormation templates for more projects to make it as easy as possible to get started. Aminator has been ... Read more

Every EC2 instance has access to meta-data, which can be used in combination with cloud-init to automation processes as an instance boots. CloudFormation parameters add extra flexibility to passing data to instances, and this episode will show you how to use them all.

By using reserved instances, you can save a substantial amount of money. This episode will show you how to determine the right type of reserved instance to buy.

By using Ansible in combination with AWS, you can achieve high levels of automation quickly and easily. This episode shows you how to install Ansible, configure the EC2 inventory plugin, perform ad-hoc tasks on instances, and how to write a few playbooks to automate processes.

The AWS Trusted Advisor suggests that you always have recent snapshots of your EBS volumes. Here at Answers for AWS, we agree, and have released Backup Monkey to automate that process for you. Backup Monkey loops through all EBS volumes in a given region, and creates snapshots of them. It ... Read more

Making AMIs is easy with tools such as Aminator and Packer. And copying an AMI to another region is a single API call now. However, if you produce AMIs for the public, distributing them to all regions and making the AMIs and the underlying EBS Snapshots public is still fairly ... Read more

I have release a few AMIs for some of the NetflixOSS projects. Right now, there are AMIs for Asgard and Eureka in the three US regions. If you need the AMI in another region, please let us know. Asgard The Asgard AMI is called asgard-1.2-awsanswers-ubuntu-12.04-amd64-ebs-20130716-2158. Underneath, it is ... Read more

When you go to bed at night, you turn off the lights. When you're the last to leave the office, you turn off the lights and lock the door. This is a good habit. Yet when the weekend comes, many companies keep development and testing servers running, sitting idle ... Read more