Rightscale

Ever since I started playing around with Unix ~13 years ago, I’ve been a fan of automating things. What started out as writing little (maybe pointless) shell scripts slowly but surely morphed into infrastructure automation today. As for my, or maybe anyone’s, motivation to do these things, I see three main factors: I’m easily bored — because repeating things is dull. I’m easily distracted (when I’m bored). I’m German: Of course we strive for perfection and excellence....

RightScale provides all kinds of things — from a pre-configured MySQL master-slave setup (with automatic EBS/s3 backups), to a full LAMP stack, Rails app servers, virtually all kinds of other pre-configured server templates to a nifty auto-scaling feature. We decided to leverage RightScale when we planned our move to AWS a couple months ago in order to not have to build everything ourselves. I’ve been writing this blog entry for the past five weeks and here are some observations, thoughts and tips....

I got this error message tonight when I tried to allocate another EIP from within RightScale’s dashboard. So it turns out there is a maximum of 5 (E)IPs on all AWS accounts, but there’s a contact form to request more. Meh. I wish AWS would make this part slightly easier, e.g. by announcing a customer’s own IP space.

Here’s a little HowTo on how to setup CouchDB on an AWS EC2 instance. But outside of AWS (and EC2), this setup works on any other Ubuntu server, and I suppose Debian as well. Getting started The following steps are a rough draft, or a sketch on how to get started. I suggest that you familiarize yourself with what all of these things do. If you want to skip on the reading and just get started, this should work anyway....