Simon Willison’s Weblog

Automate EC2 Instance Setup with user-data Scripts (via) I knew about EC2’s user-data feature—what I didn’t know is that the Alestic and Canonical images are configured so that if the user-data starts with #! the instance will automatically execute it as a shell script as soon as it boots up (after networking has been configured).

# 11th March 2010, 12:31 pm / deployment, ec2, sysadmin, userdata

Tile Drawer (via) The most inspired use of EC2 I’ve seen yet: center a map on an area, pick a Cascadenik stylesheet URL (or write and link to your own) and Tile Drawer gives you an Amazon EC2 AMI and a short JSON snippet. Launch the AMI with the JSON as the “user data” parameter and you get your own OpenStreetMap tile rendering server, which self-configures on startup and starts rendering and serving tiles using your custom design.

# 26th August 2009, 9:32 am / amazon, cascadenik, cloud-computing, ec2, json, mapnik, mapping, michal-migurski, openstreetmap, userdata