Okay, so we started looking into using EC2 to power Facebook applications. Now, EC2 is not your garden variety virtual hosts. You get a reasonable amount of RAM and processor power, but that means you are not paying $6 a month any more.
The basic system types are
Small Instance (default)*
- 1.7 GB memory
1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
160 GB instance storage (150 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
Price: $0.10 per instance hour
Large Instance
- 7.5 GB memory
4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB instance storage (2 x 420 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
Price: $0.40 per instance hour
Extra Large Instance
- 15 GB memory
8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
1,690 GB instance storage (4 x 420 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
Price: $0.80 per instance hour
So, if you get your calculator out, 10c an hour is $72 a month before you add in bandwidth and additional storage for your customized AMI.
Anyway, the initial set up all went very smoothly using the EC2 getting started guide.
After I connected to the instance, first the housekeeping
yum update
Next, I needed PHP 5.2.x rather than the default 5.0.4 – Something to do with SimpleXMLElement in case anyone is interested
If you just need PHP to work with JSON, use
yum install php-json
If you need PHP 5.2, here’s the steps
cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget http://remi.collet.free.fr/rpms/remi-fedora.repoyum --enablerepo=remi update mysqlyum --enablerepo=remi update phpapachectl restart
Hope this saves someone some time.