Windows on Amazon, Day 2
Friday, October 24, 2008 by Dave Winer.
Yesterday's initial exploration of EC2 was a success. I have a server running in Amazon's cloud. It was up overnight. Still there the next day, exactly as I left it. 
I was able to get Firefox installed and run a few performance tests of the net connection. Nothing that would blow you away, but enough for a modest server. There must be a way to up the bandwidth, but that's not a concern right now.
The next thing to learn how to do is: 1. Save my work so in case the server crashes I can restart it, and... 2. Reserve an IP address for the server, so I can map a domain name to it, and so that others can talk to the server over the Internet as you would any server. Eventually I will run scripting.com in the Amazon cloud, at least that's the plan right now.
As before, I'm just going to narrate my work here, and ask any questions I have here, and if they get resolved, provide the answers.
First question is whether the AMI that I create from my instance is private. I haven't entered any passwords into the Firefox install, so I'm not really risking anything. I guess I'm wondering whether I should install my server software in the AMI or in a disk image that gets mounted by the instance when its launched. My guess is the latter. Though I really would like to create a public AMI that has my server software built into it. This is one of the things I find really exciting, that I can create turnkey servers that other people can operate on their own, without me having to nurse the servers.
I put together a cheat sheet that summarizes the steps to creating an AMI from an instance.
I'm now bundling an AMI from my instance. I feel like I'm beginning to master the jargon! 
Also bundling seems to be really slow. It's been stuck at 3% for about five minutes now.
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