AWS: Overview

Amazon Web Services can be a bit overwhelming. When last counted, there were 48 tools listed on the front page.

We primarily use these services:

• EC2: This is the Elastic Cloud Computing dashboard. It is used to manage instances of virtual machines. Stacks started by OpsWorks and CloudFormation will both appear here.
• CloudFormation: Used to instantiate stacks based on a template. The template can prompt for user provided parameters, to customize the instance. This facility is employed by users who are spinning up their own CHORDS instance. Stopping and starting a Portal instance will preserve the database. To update the software running on this kind of portal:
  • ssh into the portal using the AWS instance key.
  • cd chords_testbed
  • sudo git pull
  • This process works as long as there are no database or gem updates. For the latter, a more complex procedure is required.
• OpsWorks: A DevOps application management service. It allows you to package and instantiate systems that are a combination of operating system, services and applications (Linux, MySql, Rails, custom code). Its big advantage seems to be that there is a one-button capability to redeploy the CHORDS application code, without regenerating the system. This means that the existing database will not be lost.
• S3: Simple Storage Service. We may use this to save artifacts that users will need access to, such as the CloudFormation template.