Cloud Computing: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Posted on 3 November, 2015 Updated on 6 November, 2015

Several months ago I took a lecture called Computational Web. I learnt a lot about Cloud Computing technology and to work and experiment with the Amazon Web Services (AWS), an amazing and very complex world. There are other companies and options (I intend to do a MOOC to learn how to use Microsoft Azure) but I had the opportunity to work with AWS with a 100$ credit account provided by the Professor, and we worked with EC2, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, SQS, SNS…

AWS offers a lot of products and the possibility to create a Free account to try some of them. One of the most interesting and easier to learn how to use is the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run computing environment or “server instances”. You can create and run some low capacity instances with pre-installed OS and work from them.

I used the EC2 for different tasks, but one of them was to create a java program and a Java Web Service using Apache Axis2 in a linux instance. I created a Bash script to automate the process of installing everything that is needed to run this web service. I executed this script remotely in an EC2 instance, but you can use it on any linux OS or virtual machine running linux.

If you have any doubt, you can consult this awesome tutorial of bash scripting

Here it is the code of the bash script: http://pastebin.com/jQuKfca7