I have a few EC2 Linux images that do nightly processing jobs for one of my projects. From time to time, I'll need to get in, make some code changes, configure some things, and re-bundle the image.
My toolset for these operations is painfully sparse (SSH into the box, edit files in VIM, WGET remote files that I need), and I suspect there is a much better way to do it. I'm curious to hear what other people in my position are doing.
Are you using some form of Windowing system and remote-desktop equivalent to access the box, or is it all command line? Managing EC2 Windows boxes is trivial, since you can simply remote desktop in and transfer files over the network. Is there an equivalent to this in the Linux world?
Are you doing your config changes/script tweaks directly on the machine? Or do you have something set up on your local box to edit these files remotely? Or are you simply editing them remotely then transferring them at each save?
How are you moving files back and forth between EC2 and your local environment? FTP? Some sort of Mapped Drive via VPN?
I'd really need to get some best practices in place for administering these boxes. Any suggestions to remove some of the pain would be most welcome!
EDIT: Evidently, I wasn't clear above, since the first two responses revolved around managing and configuring EC2 Instances. I just want to know how to remote desktop into a running Linux Server so that moving files around and editing them is less painful.
I don't do much manual system administration anymore. I view my infrastructure as a programmable entity, and treat it as such, by configuring systems with tools that automate configuration management, EC2 node maintenance, etc. Tools in my toolbox:
(1) - Disclosure, I work for Opscode. Other tools fill this space like Reductive Lab's Puppet.
I do bundle up an AMI when I've got a node built the way I need for a specific function. For example, if I'm building a Rails app server, I'll get all the prerequisite packages installed to save time on build.
When all else fails, I log into systems with SSH. I did manual system administration for many many years, this is old hat.
I don't install any GUI on servers unless a package has a dependency and one gets auto-installed.
I normally do two types of file transfer/file maintenance.
For packages native to the platform, I use the standard package management tool like APT or YUM. For source installs (something.tar.gz) I generally download via wget.
Configuration files are typically ERB templates managed by Chef.
I use SSH and SCP/SFTP to transfer files manually.
I keep everything related to managing systems in a software control repository. Here's my typical workflow when updating configuration on one or more systems. I start from my local workstation.
There's a few locations where files I use on EC2 nodes might be stored.
I do a lot of work in EC2, primarily testing environments and changes. As a result of my tools and workflow, I spend more time working on things I actually care about and less on dealing with individual files and thinking about specific configurations.
All of our software is deployed via RPM. Each EC2 instance type is described by a kickstart file (which lists the RPMs to be installed...). The kickstart setup means a working machine of each instance type can be built from scratch in about 10 minutes.
We then have a program that invokes anaconda (the Red Hat installer) to take a kickstart file, install the system into a directory, then bundle up the directory and push it to S3 as an Amazon Machine Image. This is all one step, so I just type:
Since a machine can be completely rebuilt, uploaded and running in about 40 minutes, it's easier to build new machine images than perform sysadmin on the actual (throwaway) EC2 instances. Therefore, no sysadmin is actually performed on EC2 instances.
I like NX for remote gui access. Very well documented too.
I use nautilus for quite a bit of file management and ssh for commands. It plugs right into your system like you were on it physically in the data center. If you're doing it from a windows box, then this sort of connectivity won't work as vfs in windows are limited.
I think you don't need a Remote Desktop for these tasks.
As others mentioned you can use SFTP to transfer the files between the boxes. Use WinSCP client to connect via sftp, that you can also use to edit the files on you windows machine (by double clicking on them) as if it was on your local machine. You can also use it to copy/move files around remotely.
You may also consider using Midnight Commander (mc) on the ssh console that can speed up file operations. To install use the
yum install mcorapt-get install mccommand. Afterwards you can start it by typingmcon the terminal. It also has a built in viewer and editor that's more straightforward than vim.If your really want to have GUI - that we usually don't have on servers - you have to install the X environment and the connect to it with VNC. In such cases we connect to the VNC server thru an ssh tunnel that adds more security to it.
In answer to your question about setting up a remote desktop with X, if you're using Debian, read this. It's not exactly the greatest document on setting it it up. It has you installing way too many packages, but it's got the right idea. You really only need a dummy video driver for X, and then having VNC start an X desktop.
If you are using ubuntu: we are considering using landscape for this, its a commercial product by the ubuntu (canonical) team and will be intergrated with ec2 commands.
You could try something like capistrano but if that's not quite enough for what your after then it sounds like you are a candidate for some sort of configuration management.
Puppet, reductivelabs.com/products/puppet/ ,is a real stand out in this field but may be a little overkill for you unless you have plans of becoming bigger and then its worth the hard work up front.
If you are using one of the debian/ubuntu distro's then I would checkout Slack Roles
Its a fancy wrapper to rsync and and shell scripts. This has very little upfront learning and works well however as you grow it can get a little cludgy.