Launching TurnKey Hub into private beta: cloud deployment simplified

Alon Swartz - Mon, 2010/05/31 - 13:28 - 13 comments

Towards the end of last year we decided it was time to start working on an idea we've been toying with for a while. Mapping out the feature set was fun, and a lot of the current and future features are based on feedback we received from you guys and gals, as well as many related questions and comments from around the net.

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Automating EC2 instance setup with user-data scripts

Alon Swartz - Mon, 2010/04/19 - 10:40

I recently published ec2metadata which provides a simple CLI and Python interface to the metadata of an Amazon EC2 instance. In that post I mentioned that "one of the most useful pieces of data is user-data, which can be used to pass configuration information or even initialization scripts to the instance upon launch".

I received a couple of responses by email asking for more information, so here it is.

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EBSmount: Automatically mount EBS devices on Amazon EC2

Alon Swartz - Thu, 2010/04/15 - 10:27 - 2 comments

The 2 most annoying things about Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage) I have found, is that there is no support to auto-attach an EBS on instance launch, and the need to manually mount an EBS when it's attached.

If the above annoys you as well, you're in luck! The first annoyance has been solved in the TurnKey Hub (private beta soon to be announced - request an invite here), and the second, well, is solved by EBSmount.

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Amazon EC2 metadata - Python library and CLI

Alon Swartz - Wed, 2010/03/24 - 10:35 - 4 comments

Each Amazon EC2 instance has associated metadata, as well as user data supplied when launching the instance. The meta and user data is instance-specific, and therefore only accessible to the instance.

The data is useful on several levels, such as configuring SSH public keys, programmatically configuring the instance according to certain criteria, or even executing user supplied initialization scripts.
 

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Exploring S3 based filesystems S3FS and S3Backer

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2010/01/11 - 21:58

In the last couple of days I've been researching Amazon S3 based filesystems, to figure out if maybe we could integrate that into an easy to use backup solution for TurnKey Linux appliances.

Note that S3 could only be a part of the solution. It wouldn't be a good idea to rely exclusively on S3 based automatic backups because of the problematic security architecture it creates. If an attacker compromises your server, he can easily compromise and subvert or destroy any S3 based automatic backups. That's bad news.

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