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Got an Hour? Create a Server in the Cloud

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<img alt=”davewiner_mar_09.jpg” src=”http://www.indometric.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/ae60c_davewiner_mar_09.jpg” width=”77″ height=”100″ Dave Winer days gone by announced EC2 for Poets, a step-by-step guide to help you start a server on Amazon’s EC2. His how-to is so simple to know that we had our own server up and running within the hour. Sure, it may not seem like much that this honestly uninteresting page is sitting out here somewhere, but for this writer, it was an incredible coup.

“It’s time to stop thinking about these servers as life things for geeks and start thinking about them as things for people with thoughts,” Winer said in a podcast roadmap he made for this work. The technology available today is enabling anyone with even the slightest technological bent to get out here and start incredible new things; often taking the technology in directions than the company which made it could have ever imagined.

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EC2 for Poets is named after a class that Winer took at the University of Wisconsin called Computer Science for Poets, everywhere the thought of “taking something that’s inherently technological, and instead of doing something that technologists like to do with it – which is make it more mysterious – is to try and take as much of the mystery out of it as possible, and make it simple.”

Much like Winer, many people find it hard getting caught up with Amazon’s EC2 because of the new thoughts and/or new terminology it introduces: “running instances,” “EBS Volumes,” Key Pairs,” Elastic IPs,” “Security Groups,” ‘AMIs.” Even the definitions are more often than not hard to know. But, once you realize that much of the wording is just in a different form to the names of thoughts we’re familiar with, it becomes a lot more fascinating. For instance, the term “security groups,” Winer clarifies, “is essentially a firewall.”

We went through Winer’s HowTo: EC2 for Poets, and within 20 minutes had set most of it up. But for two instances, it went smoothly.

In step 12 of launch your server, Winer clarifies

“You must see a single entry whose status is “starting.” We’re now waiting for it to change to “running.” This could take as much as 10 or 15 minutes, depending on how busy the angels and elves at Amazon are.”

When we got to this step, our status of “pending” took nearly 30 minutes to resolve. No biggie, just helpful to note that it may take longer.

The second time we got a small stuck was when trying to wake the server up.

“First, locate the Key-Pair file (mine is called Tahoe), open it with a text editor (Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on the Mac). Select-All. Copy. Close the file.”

It took a few minutes to realize this is the file we had downloaded earlier in the administer; most likely due to this writer getting hyper excited of having become, as Dave Winer points out in excellent humor “a cloud computing expert.”

Our ‘instance’ or ‘server’ took 20 minutes to set up; then another 30 minutes was spent waiting for the Amazon gods to make it a reality. Amazingly, a virtual server in under an hour.

EC2 for Poets is a must read if you’re interested in utilizing the cloud for your server needs. And even if the cloud doesn’t excite you in the slightest, we highly recommend spending an hour with Winer, if for no other reason than to truly see how technology today really is made for everyone.

As Winer points out in his podcast, “here is nothing inherently more hard about installing software on a server than here is of installing software on a Mac or PC – it’s exactly the same thing.”

“Everywhere we need to be,” says Winer, “and this happens ahead of schedule on in every technology, we end up relying on the tech companies too much. It makes sense at first; we need someone to set it up for us and make it simple, but then, it has its downside because we end up life controlled by them and they may be taking us someplace we don’t want to go.”

“Then the users break out and they do it on their own,” he adds. And this is what EC2 for Poets can do for us. It can help us get out here and do it on our own a lot quicker.

An vital point to remember: if you do choose to try this out, make sure you shut it off when you’re done; you’ll be paying about $1 for every eight hours you run the server.

But now, having made this server in the cloud, the question remains, what next?

We have a server which is hosting a single Web page, but we’re honestly sure the ReadWriteWeb community can reckon of far more exciting uses for this benefit now that Dave Winer has made it simple for all of us to know. So, what would you build? Let us know in the comments.

HowTo: EC2 for Poets
EC2 for Poets Roadmap (22 minute Podcast)

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