Testing Amazon EC2 On Windows
By: Brad Foutz
The past couple of weeks I have been learning and testing Amazon EC2 with Windows. I wrote another post about just getting started here. When Amazon announced that Windows would be available I started looking for a project since our current infrastructure and developers are all windows based. Now that I have a project I am actually able to work on this on company time ;).
After setting up a couple of servers, one with IIS and the other with SQL server, I see some issues that I will have to overcome before moving the servers to EC2. I will answer the first one in this post; the others will be in future posts.
1. How to handle load balanced web requests using?
2. What do you do about websites that need a certificate?
3. Internal IP address is set by DHCP and each instance you start has a new IP address.
I have not found all of the answers yet for each of these and this is in no way a complete list. I will write another post with any more issue I find.
1. How to handle load balanced web requests?
Right now I am using Windows Network Load Balancing service for our web servers in a standard (“old school”) non-virtualized server environment. This solution needs static IP addresses and a static “cluster IP” which is bound to the server in order to handle the traffic. Amazon only offers 1 IP address per instance and the public IP address is mapped to the internal one. The only way I can see around this is to think about the Amazon environment as simple as possible. The WNLB service is really a separate operation that Microsoft included with Windows. Separating this service off of the web server and onto its own seems to solve the issue. Incoming request will go to the load balancer server (which is probably going to be a Linux instance, Amazon article here) that has elastic IP address associated with it. A second instance should also be running and configured to take over if this instance is terminated. The elastic IP only needs to be re-associated with the secondary instance and the websites will be back up and running.
The second and third questions will be in a future post.