A Simple Plone setup on Amazon EC2 and S3

I'm David 'pigeonflight' Bain (see blog here). This wiki represents notes on the process of configuring an EC2 instance for Plone.

Why this wiki?

I'm actually doing a presentation on EC2 and Plone at the upcoming Plone Conference. The big reason this exists is to get feedback, which hopefully I can incorporate in the finished talk. So leave a comment.

Amazon EC2 - Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud is a utility that makes it possible to run Linux instances on infrastructure provided by Amazon. You can launch up to 20 instances on demand (with clearance from amazon, you can launch more). If you know what you're doing you can create preconfigured machine images with all the Linux software you want.

Plone - A powerful content management system/framework (learn more at http://plone.org and http://plone.net).

I started this journey before Amazon made it possible to mount persistent blocks (i.e. Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes). In the absence of persistent storage I learned to be very careful with my data. A habit that I should carry with me, now that persistent storage is available via EBS.

Ubuntu Ahead

This is an Ubuntu specific implementation, I'll try to point out the generals among the specifics.

The goals

1. An easy to deploy, persistent Plone solution for EC2
2. Fast, from zero to startup

The steps

1. Register with EC2 - Head to http://aws.amazon.com/ and sign up, you will need a credit card as this is a paid service, no free testing instances :(
2. Setup the Tools
3. Launch an EC2 Instance
4. Access the Instance
5. Setup an EBS Volume
6. Install the Dependencies
7. Setup a Plone Development Environment or A Hosting Environment

Other stuff

Operating Costs

Automating It

Dependency on External Systems

A good video on bundling AMIs

Performance

Other services (LiveMesh??, GoGrid, Mosso (VPS providers.....)