Will Beattie's Blog

The very first thing I do when building an Amazon EC2 image is too disable the Shut Down button. Shutting Down an instance has the same effect of terminating the instance, meaning you lose all data not stored on EBS volumes. Click Start > Run > Type “gpedit.msc” and press enter Go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Toolbar The option you are looking for is “Remove and prevent access to the Shut Down, Restart, Sleep, and Hibernate commands” Right Click > Properties > Select Enabled > Click Apply > Click OK Now when you go to the Start Menu you will see this with the only options being Lock and Log Off. Now you can use the AWS Management Console to manage reboots or terminations.

Recently Amazon EC2 announced that they were going to support Windows Server 2008 instances. The experience with GoGrid has been rocky to say the least and most recently the MyGSI’s shortcomings confirmed that the service was not able to meet our applications requirements for using instances on demand. Which brings me to this post. After 14 months with GoGrid I have just recently completed a migration of all applications and databases to Amazon EC2 and thought I would outline the steps I took. Creating New Instances Before you start you will need to create your new instances in Amazon EC2. I have covered this previously in another post . When you set up the firewall it is important that you open Port 1433 for traffic coming from your previous web server in GoGrid. Or if you want you can even create a temporary VPN between your GoGrid web server and EC2 database server using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud . This is an important step in ensuring minimal downtime. At this...