Tag Archives: ec2

New Amazon EC2 Feature: Boot from Elastic Block Store

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Amazon Announced the new Feature: Boot from Elastic Block Store

“You can now launch Amazon EC2 instances from an AMI backed by Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store). This new functionality enables you to launch an instance with an Amazon EBS volume that serves as the root device.

This new feature brings a number of important performance and operational benefits and also enables some really powerful new features:

* Headroom – The root device (and hence the Amazon Machine Image or AMI) can now occupy up to 1 TB. You can now create more richly featured AMIs, installing additional tools, libraries, applications, and even reference data ahead of time.
* Flexibility – Each AMI can now reference one or more EBS snapshots. An EBS volume will be created from each snapshot and then attached to the new instance before it begins to boot. For instance, you could attach reference data such as a Public Data Set to each new instance.
* Performance – Instances will launch more quickly when they are booted from an EBS snapshot.
* Control – Instances can be stopped and then restarted at a later time. The contents of the volume are, of course, preserved while the instance is stopped, so you get the benefits of a persistent root device without being tied down to a particular piece of compute hardware.”

To test this feature, updated API tools is needed to be installed.

AWS Blog Announcement
Amazon API Tool to Boot from EBS
My previous post: Testing Bootable EBS with different AKI and ARI

Exciting feature to test and make use of it on production systems. 😉

Deleting Old EBS Snapshots

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This is a plain and simple way to manage old mysql EBS snapshots. Maintain the latest five recent snapshots of a specific volume. You don’t want to mess with other existing volume snapshots, right? 🙂

1. Install Eric Hammond’s ec2-consistent snapshot

codename=$(lsb_release -cs)
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/alestic/ppa/ubuntu $codename main" |
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/alestic-ppa.list
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys BE09C571
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y ec2-consistent-snapshot
sudo PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1 cpan Net::Amazon::EC2

2. Copy the lines below to a file $HOME/.my.cnf, (make sure to change file permission to read only using chmod 600)

   [client]
   user=root
   password=MYPASSWORD

3. Just copy your AWS access and secret key to $HOME/.awssecret separated by a linefeed.(make sure to change file permission to read only using chmod 600)

  aws_accesskey
  aws_secretkey

4. Download Tim Kay’s AWS tool and make the file executable.

    sudo wget https://github.com/timkay/aws/raw/master/aws -O   /usr/local/sbin/aws
    sudo chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/aws

Updated 12/13-2010: URL for Tim Kay’s aws program.

5. Setup a cronjob. Adjust cronjob to your backup schedules. If you want to maintain 10 snapshots, replace the 5 at sed command. The one-liner code was posted here.

# to snapshot your mysql
0 0 * * * /usr/bin/ec2-consistent-snapshot --mysql --xfs-filesystem /vol vol-XXXXXX >> /mnt/backup.log  2>&1
# Delete the last 5 old snapshots.
0 2 * * * /usr/local/sbin/aws dsnap | grep vol-XXXXXXX | sort -r -k 5  | sed 1,5d | awk '{print "Deleting snapshot: " $2 " Dated:" $8}; system("/usr/local/sbin/aws delsnap " $2 )'  >>  /mnt/backup.log  2>&1

Code Updated fixing redirection.

I’m using Eric Hammond’s Ubuntu Jaunty: ami-ed46a784 for this setup. Note that this ami-ed46a784 is using an older kernel with bug that pose possible access to root account in a multiuser environment.

New Releases of Ubuntu Images for Amazon EC2 (Kernels, Security, Tools, PPA, runurl)
New 2.6.21 kernel+modules: XFS breaks on Ubuntu Hardy, Intrepid