EC2 and RightScale

EC2 is Amazon's 'processing in the cloud' service and RightScale is a system for managing EC2. EC2 provides a set of web services which allow you to start and stop server instances.

But whilst EC2 is incredibly powerful, managing the processes still takes quite a bit of work. It's definitely less involved than trying to manage lots of physical servers in your own rack, but there is still a lot to do, and the RightScale service aims to make it easier. RightScale offers a browser interface through which you can start and stop instances, but that isn't its real strength; through the use of RightScripts they don't just make managing an EC2 instance easier, they've invented a new kind of service.

RightScripts are executed when an instance is launched, so the simple but powerful idea is to launch a basic instance, and then customise it through scripts. For example, you might launch a simple CentOS box, and then run a script to install and configure MySQL, and another for Ruby on Rails. Of course, if you only ever created one box, you might not see the value in doing this, when compared to configuring a new unit by hand. But the RightScale model means that provided the initial instance is kept up-to-date with patches, and the scripts are updated whenever MySQL or Rails changes, then each time you launch an instance and run the scripts, you get a totally up-to-date server.

If you then ensure that all of your data is also in the cloud—using Amazon's S3—then keeping your servers up-to-date becomes easy; just start a new instance with the latest software, restore the data from your last backups (stored on S3) and then point your DNS to the new server. Once the DNS changes have completed, you can simply terminate the old instance.

We now use EC2 and S3 for all of our servers and our customers', and we have numerous RightScale scripts that we use to do everything from launch new Drupal sites, fire up a full SugarCRM server, automatically create and run MySQL backups, and more.