Or: How I am spending my gardening leave for the next couple of weeks.
Doing some performance and scalability testing on Amazon Web Services, and possibly comparing with Microsoft Azure.
This involves writing a web application in Ruby on Rails which is going to use SimpleDB for storing data records and either MySQL or PostgreSQL on EC2 instances for handling and querying (complex) relationships between those records. And all this is going to cost me a few quid for on-demand usage.
</geekgasm>
Setting up an EC2 instance is complicated. Instances don't persist when you shut them down, so to get one with just what you want installed, you have to create your own image (AMI). This involves starting up a base image with the OS you want (e.g. Ubuntu 9.10 Server), installing the software you want, then bundling it. Except that's dodgy, because creating an image while services are running can have odd side-effects. So I found a solution which involves bundling a completely basic instance without anything installed, then downloading and unbundling it and running some funky commands to simulate running on it. Then you install the bits that you want and rebundle it.
Currently building one with lighttpd, MySQL 5.1 and ruby, plus assorted gems.
It lives!
Right. I should probably go to bed then.