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Issue 11.2 ('Boolean')
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FEATURE

EC2 to the Rescue

Using Amazon EC2 for Real Studio Web Applications

Issue: 11.2 (March/April 2013)
Author: Christian Schmitz
Author Bio: Christian Schmitz is the creator of the Monkeybread Software Real Studio Plugins.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 14,302
Starting Page Number: 44
Article Number: 12107
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.yourserver.com/test.zip
http://ec2-xxx.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
http://ec2-xxx.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/MyApplication/myapplication.cgi

Excerpt of article text...

Recently we looked for a way to quickly deploy a web app in a few minutes to demonstrate it on a real server to a client. Another need was to install a web app for a client which only needs to run a few weeks. So, we needed something on-demand and without big cost. For our MBS demo web apps, we already use a virtual private server with jiffybox.de, a company in Germany near Munich. For just 0.02 Euro per hour, we can rent a server there which costs less than 15 Euro a month (including VAT). Unfortunately, it's only in Germany, so for my international clients, we were looking for an alternative.

We discovered Amazon EC2 service recently. They offer various data centers and a lot of pricing options. But one of them is the Micro Instance for just $0.02 U.S.D. per hour. For a month that is less than $15 (without sales tax if applicable). You can setup an account very quickly and for new clients Amazon even offers 750 hours free for the Micro instances. That's great for testing it! A new instance is quickly setup and you can have your Web App running as stand alone in a few minutes. For CGI you need a little more time to install and configure the apache service.

Installation

Once you have created an account for EC2, you get to your main console which looks like Figure 1.

Now you can start the wizard and go through all the steps to set up an instance. Your wizard may look different, but the steps are similar. The first step is to select an operation system (see Figure 2).

You can simply use the Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS package (or a newer LTS one). Ubuntu comes preinstalled with the libraries you need for Real Studio Web Apps like gtk-2.0. Please choose the 32-bit option so you don't need to worry about installing compatibility libraries for running a 32-bit application on a 64-bit linux. Once Real Software will allow compiling for 64-bit in the future, you may go with 64-bit. But 64-bit is only useful with more than 4GB memory anyway.

...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.