Jaan Paljasma | Tech Blog

AWS OpsWorks. Image courtesy of Amazon Web Services Does AWS OpsWorks drive you nuts with its auto-update feature eating up your resources and messing up your deployments? There is now a solution to mitigate that, with manageable agent updates. This recently-added feature allows you to select if you'd like to opt in for agent auto-updates or would you like to stick to a specific (and tested by you) version of AWS OpsWorks. Go to  Add Stack  page, in the  OpsWorks Agent Version  field, choose  Manual update  and pick a version. Try this out today by editing one of your stacks to specify an agent version (be sure to do this in your test environment first). This updates the agents and cookbooks on all online instances in that stack immediately. Click the  Changelog  link to learn about the changes that come with the new agent. You can also update the agent on a single instance instead of the entire stack by selecting a version on the...

New, "Explosive" C4 instance type from AWS It has been a while since Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced new cloud hardware. For those unfamiliar with the cloud: yes, even cloud computing need actual hardware to run. The update will brings new, explosive c4 compute-optimized instance type on board, and while I still cannot see this type in my AWS console, I'm sure the promised architecture behind it will be good one. Apparently AWS has ordered the specific Haswell CPU from Intel, designed just for EC2: The new C4 instances are based on the Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (code name Haswell ) processor. This custom processor, designed specifically for EC2 , runs at a base speed of 2.9 GHz, and can achieve clock speeds as high as 3.5 GHz with Turbo boost. These instances are designed to deliver the highest level of processor performance on EC2.  As said, there are no CPU benchmarks available yet, but I was quite surprised on their c3.large instance type performance and it h...

Amazon announced new generation C3 instance types , which are compute optimized instances, available in 5 sizes: c3.large, c3.xlarge, c3.2xlarge, c3.4xlarge and c3.8xlarge with 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 vCPUs respectively. C3 instances will provide you with the highest performance processors and the lowest price/compute performance compared to all other Amazon EC2 instances. C3 instances also feature Enhanced Networking and SSD-based instance storage . For C3 Instances, each vCPU is a hardware hyperthread from 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 (Ivy Bridge) processors. Setting up c3.large instance with SSDs When setting up instance, make sure you add both Instance Store volumes. Its up to you how you like to set up your root storage, For this example I opted for 16GB, 480 provisioned IOPS (you need to maintain 30:1 ratio): Testing the SSD speed Once set up and server launched, we can use 2nd 16GB SSD (mounted on /dev/sdc) for swap on new Amazon Linux instance c3.large # Tes...