Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I enter the world of cloud computing and learn that, once again, we go forward to the past.

I finally did it. I entered the world of actual virtual cloud computing. Not just Facebooking or DropBoxing, but actual computing. Well, not much computing, but making a few bits move.

Earlier this year I obtained a free, one-year trial of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS). After months of procrastination, I worked my way through the instructions of creating a virtual computer on Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (ECC or EC2). The instructions were pretty good, but not as good as I would have preferred. I would have preferred a person talking me through it, but that is me.

Anyways, I

• created a virtual Linux machine
• created an instance
• initiated the instance
• connected to it
• downloaded the gcc compilers
• wrote a Hello World program
• made it and ran it

Not very impressive when I look at it like this, but I learned a few things and that is worth time.

Problems: I did all this from an Apple iMac OS X (10.9) machine. Some of the things promised in the instructions did not work. Maybe there is an OS and a browser problem. I eventually went to the terminal shell on the iMac to set the mode of the key pair file and connect to the virtual cloud computer (ssh -i /path/key-pair-file.pem ec2-user@public-dns-name).

What threw me next was that Comcast had a problem and the Internet was disconnect for 12 hours. The next day, I went back at it and finished the experiment.

Conclusions: We go forward to the past. Thirty years ago it seems I was doing the same thing. I sat in front of a computer and used it as a terminal to another computer that was somewhere else. My terminal this time was much more powerful than thirty years ago, the distant computer was also more powerful, and the network connection was through the Internet instead of a dedicated network.

I can see why people like to use AWS EC2. Amazon does most of the work by having servers running all the time. All I have to do is right software that does what I want. And that has always been a challenge.