Single instance Amazon EC2

Question

We're running a lightweight web app on a single EC2 server instance, which is fine for our needs, but we're wondering about monitoring and restarting it if it goes down.

We have a separate non-Amazon server we'd like to use to monitor the EC2 and start a fresh instance if necessary and shut down the old one. All our user data is on Elastic Storage, so we're not too worried about losing anything.

I was wondering if anyone has any experience of using EC2 in this way, and in particular of automating the process of starting the new instance? We have no problem creating something from scratch, but it seems like it should be a solved problem, so I was wondering if anyone has any tips, links, scripts, tutorials, etc to share.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You should have a look at puppet and its support for AWS. I would also look at the RightScale AWS library as well as this post about starting a server with the RightScale scripts. You may also find this article on web serving with EC2 useful. I have done something similar to this but without the external monitoring, the node monitored itself and shut down when it was no longer needed then a new one would start up later when there was more work to do.

Answer 2

take a look at www.scoutapp.com, it's worth it for simple monitoring and alert.

Answer 3

As a side point:

All our user data is on Elastic Storage, so we're not too worried about losing anything.

I'd strongly suggest to regularly snapshot your EBS (Elastic Block Storage) to S3 if you are not doing that already.