I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work with Amazon Web Services. Over the past few weeks I have been developing a simple way to manage multi-node applications using EC2. Much of this is very project-specific but the methodology could easily be applied to a wide variety of deployments. The techniques described here were inspired by this blog post. This article is intended for people who are already somewhat familiar with Amazon Web Services — for a brief introduction to S3 and EC2, view my previous blog post. If you’re ready for it, read on.

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I was reading a couple of my favorite blogs recently and I saw a few examples of what is starting to become commonplace among the blogging community. Whether it’s somebody trying to find an obscure painting, or a well-known software firm attempting to secure an advertising contract, it’s become fairly common to see people trying to get something done via a blog post.

While it immediately struck me as somewhat lazy to outsource these tasks to your readers, I realized rather quickly that it makes a ton of sense. I’m sure that Jason at 37 Signals did his research trying to find the best marketing firm, but he’s limited to the resources of one or a few people. And I’m sure that Anthony scoured the web and Google images to try and find his painting to no avail. BEFORE they posted. But I guess that’s one of the good things about being a high-profile blog (that’s right I consider vdov high-profile) – you have the kind of distribution that makes doing something like this on your own almost selling yourself short.

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