Our UK partners NTE posted on their a blog a detailed feedback for the EC2 Framework private beta . Ian thanks for your feedback, we really appreciate it.
I have to say I’m quite excited by the amount of traction our EC2 and cloud solution is receiving these days.
I encourage all of our users to provide feedback and suggest things we should do differently or better.
With that in mind, let me comment on Ian’s great feedback.
Issue 1 – Adding ports to security groups
You need to open the following ports on the “default” security group in order to use the framework
TCP Port 22 – used for SSH communication to the AMIs
TCP Port 80 – used for deploying the GigaSpaces Web Management Center and the Ganglia monitoring tool
TCP Port 443 – used for secured http. (we fixed the typo, thanks!)
You can do the above very easily using the elastic fox plugin (no need to install the Amazon API). Click the “security groups” tab and then click the “Grant Permission” green check mark. We will add this to our docs.
The private beta currently supports the default security group. The next release will have support for custom security groups, and then it will be recommended to create your own group and not to use the default one.
Issue 2 – start-ui = true
“true” and “admin application” is the same thing, in the next release we’ve changed the default in the data-example to be “admin-application”.
Issue 3 – Starting the GigaSpaces Management Tool.
In the current version we still have some issues with the UI connectivity, It has been fixed for the next release. Adding the nxclient local installation as a better workaround, is a good idea, we will updated the docs accordingly.
Step-by-step Instructions
The cloud framework can save some of the trouble of doing this, but obviously if you want to use the EC2 API directly, your post contains a very helpful description. Thank you. We will work on adding a “step-by-step” guide to our WIKI as well.
A few notes I would like to add:
1. As mentioned above I recommend using the FireFox Plugin to open the ports.
2. Please make sure the AWS Account ID you are using is dedicated to GigaSpaces (i.e. not used to run AMIs which are not GigaSpaces related), we don’t want to bill you for non-GigaSpaces usage :)
3. Port 22 is used for SSH communication to the AMIs
4. Monitoring – we have ganglia built-in to the cloud framework AMIs, you can point to the UI machine with /ganglia at the end of the public IP and view the entire cluster.
Cheers
Dekel
