Integrate Amazon EC2 with PDFMonkey

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. With Amazon EC2, customers can use AWS to launch an instance in minutes and pay only for the computing capacity they need. Amazon EC2 offers two ways of deploying applications:In this example, we will be using both, in order to show how to use PDFMonkey in the Amazon EC2 platform.

PDFMonkey is a Java application that converts PDF documents into editable Microsoft Word documents. It uses the Java PDFBox library to read PDFs and convert them into editable Word documents. The conversion is done inside the user's browser by sending the PDF document to PDFMonkey's server using Ajax technology. PDFMonkey supports full editing capabilities including cut, copy, paste, text formatting and image editing. In addition, it has a powerful search feature that allows users to search within their document for words or phrases. The search results are displayed by an overlay that shows all the instances of those terms found in the document. PDFMonkey's search functionality is similar to Google's search functionality.

The first step is to create an Amazon Web Services account which you can do at https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/. For more information on Amazon Web Services please visit http://aws.amazon.com/what-is-aws/. After you have created your account, you will be given a security key that you will need to access Amazon EC2. You can find your security key on your account page under "Security Credentials".

After you have your security key, you will need to create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI. that will be used to launch your image. An AMI is a template that contains the code and configurations needed to start an instance of a software application or operating system. To create an AMI, log into your AWS Management Console and select Elastic Computing Cloud from your AWS navigation bar. Then select "Launch Instance". After you've selected "Launch Instance" you will be taken to the "Step 1. Choose an Amazon Machine Image" page where you have several options to choose from:

"Community AMIs" are free, publicly available images provided by third-party vendors but managed by Amazon.You must select either Linux or Windows and then choose which operating system version you would like. If you choose a 64-bit system you will have more memory than if you had chosen 32-bit. The next step is to select which type of hardware configuration you would like. This requires some research because you are limited to what Amazon has available; however, you may want to consider selecting the largest amount of RAM possible since this is needed for PDFMonkey's software to run properly. If you are not sure which computer configuration you should use, consult the PDFMonkey website http://pdfmonkey.com/help/faq#ec2 for more information about how much RAM is needed for different file types and sizes. This screen also allows you to select the storage size of your image; however, the default should work just fine. Make sure that "Your own AMI" is selected, click on "Review and Launch" and then click on "Launch". This will bring up the "Step 2. Choose an Instance Type" page where you can make changes to your AMI if needed before you launch it. Once you're satisfied with your AMI settings, press the "Launch" button at the bottom of this page and wait while your instance boots up. This may take a few minutes depending on the size and resources of your AMI.Once your instance boots up, open up your web browser and go to http://yourinstanceipaddress:8080 (e.g., http://ec2-184-73-128-181.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8080. You should see PDFMonkey's login screen where you can log in using the username and password that was sent when you created your AMI.After logging in, click on the "Add Document" button at the top right of the screen to upload a PDF document from your hard drive. After uploading the document click on "Convert Document". Your document will now be converted and saved as a Microsoft Word document on Amazon's S3 storage service. At this point, there are a couple of things that you can do with your converted document:If you want to do any of these things, just click on "Download Document", enter in your credentials again if prompted, and download your converted document onto your computer. Keep in mind that if you are downloading a large file it may take a few minutes to download depending on your internet connection speed. Also, if you are downloading multiple files at once, they may take longer than others because your request is divided between each of them; however, this is only temporary because they will all finish downloading at the same time eventually unless there is another request made between them (i.e., someone else has downloaded one of them.

Amazon EC2 integrates well with PDFMonkey because it gives users access to free computing power via their web browser as long as they know how to use it correctly; it also saves them money because they don't have to buy expensive computers and maintenance contracts for them; it allows users to have access to all of their documents anytime anywhere because their documents are stored in AWS' S3 storage service; and it saves them time because they don't have to worry about installing computers and software because it is all done for them automatically by AWS; however, there are some limitations such as having to manage your own security keys and download limits per month which could become costly if not managed properly; and finally it does not integrate well with other services such as Google Docs because it does not save documents directly there so they have to be downloaded from S3 first before they can be uploaded into Google Docs or other services.

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