Public interop tests with hosting in amazon cloud: first experience

Hi all,

we tried to follow the suggestion to host our cmis connector at amazon for public interop tests. As various others have been interested in this I would briefly like to share our experience so far.

At this time I cannot recommend that service at all. Think twice before choosing this way!

You have to pay for every bit and piece. The documentation of this is terrible and the system behaves in a way that is different to other known virtualization software. You can extremely easily lose your data without any warning. You can't simply start and stop your instance, your data are gone then. You buy a 160GB virtual machine (smallest one) but you effectively get 10GB as there is no way (!) to persist the D partition which hast 150GB of the 160GB. And of course this behavior is not documented at all, you will notice this after your first shutdown and restart….

Also some repositories might have difficulties with changing ip addresses and host names between reboots.

In case you still want to use this carefully read the documentation. But be advised that the documentation does not mention all the important things to know. Reading the forums will give you an impression. Upload transfer rate is typically below 100KB/s (so it might take you hours to transfer your installation CD/DVD).

We are struggling for almost a week now to set this up and lost twice all our data. If you really want to try this be sure that you exactly know what you are doing. Feel free to contact Florian or me for more information in case you still want to try this. We liked the idea of enabling this temporary and just pay while online. But from a practical perspective this is more an option that only exists in theory. Currently I think any other web hosting service works better.

Jens

P.S: No it is not yet running. Please don't ask for getting access ;) we will provide more information when we are done with this.

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