AT: Moving Ahead With Amazon EC2 (Building the testing environment)

AT – Acceptance Testing
For the first try I decided to build the following very simple Windows lab:

• Domain Controller with DNS
• Application Server

Here are some questions that you must have the answer before moving forward:

• Which amazon images (AMI) to use for the virtual machines? How to create AMI for VMs?
  Actually had no any chance to create the AMI from scratch. Could not argue with anything here…but it is possible. I chose the easiest and fastest option to create AMI by modifying the one from the Amazon Machine Images library.
• What is the difference between Instance-Store and EBS root devices?
  

  When you launch your Amazon EC2 instances you have the ability to store your root device data on Amazon EBS or the local instance store. By using Amazon EBS, data on the root device will persist independently from the lifetime of the instance. This enables you to stop and restart the instance at a subsequent time, which similar to shutting down your laptop and restarting it when you need it again.

  Alternatively, the local instance store only persists during the life of the instance. This is an inexpensive way to launch instances where data is not stored to the root device. For example, some customers use this option to run large web sites where each instance is a clone to handle web traffic.

• In which Amazon Region you are going to implement your testing environment?
  

  Amazon EC2 provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of Regions and Availability Zones. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones, are geographically dispersed, and will be in separate geographic areas or countries. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region. Amazon EC2 is currently available in five regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). – http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

  I am personally decided to use US East region while my work place is in Russia. The price for instance here is the cheapest!