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AWS Questions: Windows Servers

Windows servers are supported on AWS, but recently I had students ask a bevy of questions about them.  Here are some answers.  As a reminder, I speak solely for myself with these blog posts, not for AWS or any employer.

  • What versions of Windows are supported?
  • Can I create an AMI from an EBS snapshot of a Windows root volume?
    • Unlike with a linux EBS snapshot, you cannot create an AMI from a root volume.  You can create an AMI from a running instance, however.  The reason for the limitation is that sysprep must be run on the Windows server, and you can’t run sysprep on a EBS volume that is not running.
  • In order to take an accurate snapshot, I need to quiesce the disk.  How can I do so?
    • This is a thorny problem and I don’t think there’s a great answer. You want to shut down as many apps as you can. You also may find the Volume Shadow Copy Service useful. You may want to review the answers here on this reddit thread.
  • I have a Windows bastion host, and I want to allow more than two users to access this host at one time.  How can I do this?
    • You need to purchase additional Remote Desktop Services licenses.  From the FAQ: “Amazon EC2 instances come with two Remote Desktop Services (aka Terminal Services) licenses for administration purposes. If additional Remote Desktop Services licenses are needed, they should be purchased from Microsoft or a Microsoft license reseller. Remote Desktop Services licenses purchased with Software Assurance have license mobility benefits and can be brought to AWS multi-tenant environments.”
  • Is powershell a first class citizen with the same functionality as the CLI or the supported SDKs?
    • Nope.  From the Powershell page: “The AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell lets you perform many of the same actions available in the AWS SDK for .NET. You can use it from the command line for quick tasks, like controlling your Amazon EC2 instances.”  (Emphasis added.)
  • Do you have any example userdata scripts for Windows AMIs?

Amazon Machine Learning: An Introduction

From my book, Amazon Machine Learning: An Introduction:

Amazon Machine Learning, or AML, provides you access to widely applicable machine learning algorithms without having to run any servers.  This type of learning is useful for making predictions based on a set of data for which answers are known.  AML supports supervised learning with the stochastic gradient descent algorithm.  The end goal of AML is to create a model, which is what will allow you to make further predictions based on past data.

AML supports three different kinds of predictions.  For binary outcomes, where observations lead to a yes/no result, AML supports binary classification.  An example would be whether or not a prospect is likely to sign up for a new account, given their past interactions with your company.  For multi valued results, where observations lead to one of N results, AML supports multi class classification.  A good example of this would be which product to show a customer, given what they’ve looked at and bought in the past.  And, for numeric values, AML supports regression.  An example of that would be predicting house prices based on sales data and house attributes.

If you are not trying to use existing data and create predictions out of it using supervised learning, but are trying to instead recognize images or tease out patterns in text, you may want to consider alternatives to AML.

Boulder Startup Week

If you are into the tech scene in Boulder, Boulder Startup Week is a great set of events–it’s coming up May 15-19 this year.  This is a totally volunteer run set of events which highlight various aspects of startup and technology in the Boulder area.  You can learn more at the website.  It’s a great place to network and to learn about new things.

I’m lucky enough to be participating in two events this startup week.  I’ll be hanging out at the Engineering Leadership dinner.  And I’ll be presenting on bootstrapping a startup as a developer with a few other bootstrappers.  Most of my short presentation will cover lessons I’ve learned from joining The Food Corridor.  I’m especially looking forward to hearing about Brian and Inversoft that day, because I’ve been friends with him for a number of years and have followed along with some of his trials and triumphs.

Hope to see you there!

AWS Questions: EBS

So, more questions about AWS from students (and my own research/curiosity):

  • What happens when general purpose ebs volumes run out of credit because you’ve used too many IOPS?
    • Your disk performance reverts to the baseline performance: “If your gp2 volume uses all of its I/O credit balance, the maximum IOPS performance of the volume will remain at the baseline IOPS performance level (the rate at which your volume earns credits) and the volume’s maximum throughput is reduced to the baseline IOPS multiplied by the maximum I/O size.”
  • Before you take a snapshot you should quiesce the disk.  Can you do that via an AWS command?
    • You need to use whatever operating system or application command is recommended.  You can use EC2Run to execute that command, but you must determine what that command is.  From the backup and recovery whitepaper: “For this reason, you must quiesce the file system or database in order to make a clean backup. The way in which you do this depends on your database or file system. ”  Note also that the quiescing of the disk can be for only a few seconds, as the EBS snapshot process can be started quickly, though it may take a while to complete.
  • Can you be notified of snapshot completion via an event or do you have to poll?
  • Can you automate your EBS snapshots?
  • Does EBS encryption cost extra?
    • Nope: “This frequently requested feature provides you with seamless support for data encryption on block-level storage, at no additional cost.”

Getting the good content out of a Facebook group

I am astonished at how hard it is to get information out of Facebook groups.

The startup of which I am a part has created a Facebook group for dissemination of information of between commercial kitchen operators.  This was easier to get started than a forum and has the advantage of everyone being a “real person”, or at least real enough to get a Facebook account.  It also benefits from the ubiquity of Facebook–many many folks have it on their phones and get notifications about group activity.

However, it has the detriment of being a “walled garden”, with the content of the group being unavailable for searchers on the web.  Some might argue that privacy actually is a good thing, because it will encourage folks to be more honest, but really, anything you put on Facebook can be cut and pasted and made public, so I’m not sure I buy that argument.

Regardless, I wanted to find an easy, automated way to take the Facebook group content and pipe it elsewhere, where it could be reified and curated.  A human could do that, but I’d like an automated solution. And, other than the Facebook API, I haven’t found many.  Zapier (my go to integration choice) only recently released this as an option (in the last few months).  IFTTT doesn’t have it.  There’s no commercial solution that I could find that does this.  There are, however, some open source solutions.

The Facebook API makes it fairly easy to grab the posts of a group, and from the posts, the comments, but frankly, I really want a solution that doesn’t require coding up the JSON parsing/pagination handling/Oauth access.  I just tried the facebook-export tool and it seems to work just fine (though I had ended up having to update the leveldown/levelup versions to 1.5/1.3 to get past a compile error: leveldown.target.mk:114: recipe for target 'Release/obj.target/leveldown/src/batch.o' failed). It gives you all your posts as JSON.