More on EC2

Rosalyn commented on my last EC2 post that

Another option is to search through the AMIs in the Web Console to see if there is someone that has already set up Drupal.  You’ll find that there are lots of AMIs with lots of different versions of web apps.

Rosalyn is right there are a ton of great AMIs that exist with web apps preinstalled. Some of my favorites come from Bitnami. If you don’t know what Bitnami is, well its a lifesaver for folks who want to try out open source web applications and either: don’t have a server at their disposal or are freaked about setting up a LAMP install. Also there is a good Drupal image available from Acquia which provides hosted Drupal solutions. Drupal images can save lots of time if you just want to check out a particular module and don’t have a test server on which to do this. I used the Bitnami Drupal AMI to check out the XC Drupal tools earlier today. I had it working in under 10 mins and was able to dig into the module to see what it did. Got some screenshots and then powered down the AMI. Simple easy, straightforward. No fuss or muss.

For those developing open source library web apps, you could seriously improve your uptake if you provided an EC2 AMI which people could use to check out the application. The Islandora project which integrates Drupal and Fedora does exactly that, which makes it easy for people to play with the module. Since the AMI can be stopped and started at will the UPEI library folks can clear out test data easily. I’d love to see stuff like this for other open source library apps. Getting some of the NexGen catalog apps installed can be beastly. Creating and EC2 AMI would allow people to see the guts of the app without having to go through the pain of installing it.