Moving an ecommerce site to Amazon Web Services

This is an interesting one.. There is an e-commerce startup, run by a dear friend.  One fine day we were chatting around and he mentioned challenges with his business. Challenges included performance, scaling and cost issues about his hosting services provider.

My instant reaction was, why dont you move to aws.. and it clicked just like that.. We decided that we'd start with the free tier, with his mysql server on amazon RDS and rest of app server functionality on the micro instance. All of which is within purview of the free tier.  Using Cloudfront we'd localize the static content, to add to the performance of content delivery. Not now, but eventually, we'd start using ELB - the load balancer for distributing load across the instances we would have.

With something like aws, planning all that is really really that straightforward.  You just have to be a bit more technically oriented to think in terms of these things and you are set for good.

We are already thinking about configuring autoscaling for the services, so that running on the micro instance doesnt become a bottleneck for the customers. With that we'd hope to achieve dynamic automatic scaling up and down the infrastructure.

We have already taken the first steps, and I am helping his venture migrate to AWS, one of my dream jobs, to be able to consult around migration / integration of Traditional systems to cloud based systems.

Mounting a aws instance into Nautilus in ubuntu

For a particular project I needed to transfer files from my local desktop system (running ubuntu ) to my aws instance running also running Ubuntu.  shell based connections work just fine for me, however, I need a GUI solution.  GUI solution was favoured since I wanted to have a quick drag and drop solution to move files rather easily across the two instances.

Although, Nautilus provides a "Connect to Server" option, and you can bookmark it as well, the trick/issue is that with aws instances you are dealing with private/public key  authentication, not password based authentication.

For some reason the "Connect to Server" option doesnt allow you to embed a public key and therefore that authentication method doesnt work through in that case.

After quite a bit of research and googling, I had to put this question up on stackoverflow.com  where, I got a prompt and sweet response.

The trick was to use the .ssh/config file and to create an alias there, specifying the identity file, and then onwards, there is no challenge to a ssh or sftp call, since ssh routes it through the config file automatically.

Here are the sample contents of the .ssh/config file that worked for me -

Host {alias}
HostName {hostname or IP address}
User {username to log in with}
IdentityFile {path to abcd.pem}

With this in place, its possible for me to have a bookmark and clicking on that just opens the target location (like a mount point).  Sweet little trick, and makes me like ubuntu a bit more...