Web Services : Drupal and Amazon EC2 Quick Start

With all the excitement surrounding cloud computing, and specifically Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Beta service, I decided it was time to give it a try myself. Without much personal background in the new service, I found that there are an overwhelming number of pages talking about EC2, and even Drupal on EC2, but didn't locate a simple guide to quickly get me up and running. Having now spent a few hours today learning the basics, I'm jotting down these quick notes to help the next person interested in trying the same, and in the hopes of attracting useful tips from other AWS users.

1. Register With Amazon
   My first visit was to the Amazon Web Services home page, where I clicked the 'Click here to sign up!' link to create my new Amazon Web Services account (you can also sign in with your existing Amazon account, if you have one).

   I then started reviewing the Getting Started Guide which walks you through setting up some Java command line tools and creating your own Amazon Machine Images. I knew pre-created AMI's existed, so I tracked down Greggles on IRC who kindly pointed me in an simpler direction and quickly made it clear I could skip most of this guide, at least for now. It turned out all that I really needed to review in the Getting Started Guide was the 'Setting up an Account' page, following the directions on signing up for S3 and EC2. On that page, all I needed was the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key (make a note of these, you'll need them in step 3 below), skipping the section on setting up an X.509 certificate.

   From there, it was necessary to click the "Your Web Services Account" button in the top right corner of most Amazon Web Services pages and then "Payment Method" to enter credit card information, paying for Amazon's service. You also have to be sure to explicitly sign up for EC2 by clicking 'Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud' in the 'Infrastructure Services' box, then clicking the 'Sign Up For This Web Service' button.

2. Install the Elasticfox FireFox Plugin
   Yes, this requires that you're using FireFox (version 2 or 3, both work great). Install the latest Elasticfox FireFox Extension from the Amazon Web Services Developer Connection page. At the time of this writing, the Download link is a plugin for FireFox 2. Scroll down a few entries into the Discussion section for the FireFox 3 link.

   After restarting FireFox, you'll find Elasticfox in the Tools menu.
   
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