Will Beattie's Blog

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...

I know it's been a long time between drinks. But I've finally found the time to post about my latest discoveries from the land of the Bleeding Edge. I'm currently rebuilding my PC with Windows 7 Release Candidate, more on that later and have some free time. So as you would know if you have read the rest of my blog I have settled for a hosting solution of this. Go Grid – App & DB Servers EC2 - Transcoding, File Processing Services S3 - Media Storage CloudFront – CDN As we near the release date for our product we have been doing substantial testing in the area of uploading from the Client directly to S3 using Flash and then performing Transcoding in EC2. Anyone who's tried to play with the S3 API knows that it is a beast to say the least, so I choose to use the very good wrapper from Affirma called ThreeSharp . If you're doing development in .NET with S3 then you would be mad not to use it. However I have come acro...