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Mapping AWS data centers for fastest connection

Yes, that's 'fastest', not closest.

Background

A while back I published a blog post entitled Finding the closest data center using GeoIP and indexing, which described how we automatically determine the AWS regional data center to be used for storing encrypted server backups.

Amazon FPS (flexible payments system) in a nutshell

A few weeks ago I looked into Amazon FPS (Flexible Payments Service), just to see what our options are for premium services like commercial support. You know, the stuff we can't give away even if we wanted to because their are real costs involved which we couldn't subsidize without going bankrupt.

Note that we're probably not going to be using FPS in the near term but I did research it exhaustively before I ruled it out (for now). While it's fresh in my mind here's the summary for the benefit of those who might be considering it as an option.

Secure, flexible and scalable Amazon EC2 instance preseeding

I'd like to introduce Joe. He is a good looking, experienced sys-admin and like all good sysadmins, he has more stuff to do than time to do it.

Joe wants to get up and running on Amazon EC2 with a Wordpress installation, and chooses to do so with a pre-configured appliance. These are the steps Joe performs:

TKLBAM: a new kind of smart backup/restore system that just works

Drum roll please...

Today, I'm proud to officially unveil TKLBAM (AKA TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration): the easiest, most powerful system-level backup anyone has ever seen. Skeptical? I would be too. But if you read all the way through you'll see I'm not exaggerating and I have the screencast to prove it. Aha!

Finding the closest data center using GeoIP and indexing

We are about to release the TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration (TKLBAM) mechanism, which boasts to be the simplest way, ever, to backup a TurnKey appliance across all deployments (VM, bare-metal, Amazon EC2, etc.), as well as provide the ability to restore a backup anywhere, essentially appliance migration or upgrade.

Note: We'll be posting more details really soon - In this post I just want to share an interesting issue we solved recently.