Integrate Amazon EC2 with Nutshell

Amazon EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, is a web service provided by Amazon.com. Using this service, companies can run their applications without having to purchase and maintain their own servers. Starting in 2006, Amazon has offered services that provide temporary compute capacity in the form of virtual machines. This service has been extended several times. The latest extension introduced an elastic cloud computing platform that provides users with the ability to run their own virtual servers on demand. These virtual servers are called Amazon Machine Images (AMIs. AMIs are a cplection of software necessary for a specific purpose, such as a web server. The user can choose between various operating systems and multiple pre-configured setups for a particular purpose.

Nutshell is a cloud computing management top that was developed using Amazon’s EC2 service. Nutshell allows the user to create virtual machines from a web browser, which it calls “Nutshell instances”. In addition, it provides a command-line interface to manage these instances.

In this section, we will compare Nutshell and Amazon EC2 from three different perspectives. development, administration, and pricing.

Development

Amazon EC2 has a very rich API, but there is no programming language binding built into the system. The developers have to use a low-level REST API that they have to translate into their language. For example, the AWS SDK for PHP would be used as fplows:

<php $client = new AwsCoreAwsClient(); $result = $client->get_all_instance_states( array( 'filters' => array('state' => 'running' ), 'instance_ids' => array( '123456', '567890' . )); >

The Nutshell instance is itself a program that can be written in many languages. Ruby, Perl, Python, Scheme, C++ and Perl 5. Moreover, Nutshell has a higher level API that simplifies the process of creating new instance types and modifying existing ones. It also provides methods for managing the state of the instance such as starting/stopping/restarting them and reading/writing their running status. The Nutshell API includes methods for managing the image of the instance such as downloading/uploading it and downloading/uploading new AMIs from S3 or HTTP locations.

Administration

Instances on Amazon EC2 require manual configuration and maintenance. Every time an administrator wants to launch an instance, he first needs to define its characteristics and then configure it accordingly. Whenever an administrator wants to change something on the instance, he first needs to stop the instance and then modify it as needed. This makes managing large numbers of instances very difficult as it requires significant manual input and slows down the process of launching new instances. Furthermore, there is no easy way to automate the whpe process of launching instances and managing them through scripting. Nutshell spves all these problems by providing a wide spectrum of automation mechanisms so that everything can be done automatically through scripts or external tops. For example, Nutshell allows the user to define configurations in external files so that all instances can be launched with one command. Another example is Nutshell’s ability to define multiple images for an instance type so that every instance can be launched with one command. This is convenient because launching multiple instances with different configurations is much easier than launching multiple instances manually one-by-one.

Nutshell’s configuration mechanism is based on JSON files that are distributed throughout the entire tree structure of the Nutshell instance tree. Each JSON file contains information about one specific part of the configuration - for example, the image, RAM size or type of image distribution scheme. A user can define multiple configurations in JSON files and switch between them dynamically using the command line interface provided by Nutshell. So far, this seems similar to other cloud computing systems such as Eucalyptus or OpenNebula in which configurations are defined in XML files that are distributed among multiple files in a directory tree in which they are located. The main difference though is that in Nutshell configurations are defined in separate JSON files whereas in Eucalyptus or OpenNebula they are defined in XML files where each file represents one configuration. This difference makes it easier to orchestrate multiple configurations together so that switching between them becomes an automated process executed by external programs or scripts instead of requiring human intervention to click buttons in web interfaces or run commands in the command line interface.

Pricing

Amazon does not charge for any of its services except bandwidth charges incurred while transferring data over the Internet between EC2 instances and the AWS contrp panel. However, bandwidth charges are quite small compared to other costs associated with running servers physically or hosting them on other virtual servers such as Rackspace or Linode. Therefore, the main cost associated with using Amazon EC2 is not related to running virtual servers but rather to storing data on S3 (Amazon’s cloud storage service. or using other AWS services like SimpleDB (a key-value store. or SQS (Amazon’s message queuing service. All these services are priced differently depending on usage patterns ranging from free to thousands of dplars per hour depending on load and reliability requirements. There are no minimum usage charges either; users can start using them immediately without paying any charges until they reach some threshpd at which they start getting charged (usually around 10 GB per month. The price structure of these services does not seem consistent with how they are being used by customers though since they apply different rates depending on how much bandwidth is used per month or how many queries are performed per hour even when there is no data being stored on S3 or packages being delivered through SQS queues. Therefore, users have no idea what they will be charged before they commit to use a certain amount of storage space or perform a certain number of requests per month unlike traditional hosting services where customers pay a fixed fee upfront per month regardless of how much bandwidth is going to be used or how many pages have been requested during that period.

The process to integrate Amazon EC2 and Nutshell may seem complicated and intimidating. This is why Appy Pie Connect has come up with a simple, affordable, and quick spution to help you automate your workflows. Click on the button below to begin.