I must be missing something here, but can someone clue me in on how to persist changes (such as software installs etc) on machines in the cloud (either EC2 or my own Eucalyptus cloud).
I have instances running.. can attach extra disks to them etc., but every time I terminate the instance, all of my changes are lost the next time I run them.
Now, this sort of makes sense in that the instances are virtual, but, there must be some way to make these changes persist. I'm just missing how its done.
Thanks.
Peter.
With EC2, once you have installed everything you want on your EC2 instance, just create an AMI from the running instance. Any subsequent instances that you start using your AMI will include all of the changes you made. See the EC2 User Guide for details.
If you're doing this with Eucalyptus you might want to try the guide Creating an image from an existing VM. It's worked pretty well for me (because I wrote it :P)