Setting up the Amazon Simple Notication Service

The Amazon SNS is a robust way to send notification messages via multiple protocols like e-mail, SMS, HTTP, etc. There are many use cases where you can use a service like this but I want to show how to use it to get notified when my EC2 server that I created in my previous post is started. Here are the steps to create the notification:

• Create new topic

In the AWS Management Console go to the SNS service page and click ‘Create new topic’:

Using Amazon RDS with your WordPress installation

In my previous posts I created a EC2 server with a complete WordPress installation running on it. It was quite easy to set up the default instance but this instance isn’t very durable and scalable. To improve this we are going to use a database that is installed on a separate machine. That way the current EC2 server becomes a stateless application server and ready to be installed on multiple servers in different Availablity Zones. To setup a database in the cloud Amazon offers the service RDS. But before we create this database first make a dump of the existing database on our WordPress server.

Assign a fixed IP to AWS EC2 instance

As described in my previous post the IP (and DNS) of your running EC2 AMI will change after a reboot of that instance. Of course this makes it very hard to make your applications on that machine available for the outside world, like in this case our WordPress blog. That is where Elastic IP comes to the rescue. With this feature you can assign a static IP to your instance.

Working with Amazon Web Services (EC2)

As posted before I attended to a technical handson AWS training last week. The subjects during these days were of course the standard EC2 and S3 services which I have used before. Added to that we worked with RDS, Elastic Load Balancing, SNS and VPC, Elastic Beanstalk and discussed a lot of terminology and business cases.

Amazon Web Services Technical Training

Today I am attending for the second and unfortunately last day of the AWS training. Although I have played with the AWS before using the free services this training shows the possibilities that Amazon offers. Or at least the most common functionality as AWS offers way too much to show in only two days.

In the next posts I will show much more AWS stuff since it is really great to work with.