Can you publish to an existing Amazon EC2 instance using AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio?

Question

I'm trying out the free tier on Amazon EC2 and intend to host a couple of small websites through the same micro instance. I have set up and configured an EC2 micro instance running Windows Server 2008, with all the necessities. The websites are all ASP.NET MVC3 applications.

I have installed the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio and connected to my Amazon account, which all works well. The problem I have is that if I right-click my project in the Solution Explorer and choose Publish to AWS..., the only options I have is to publish it to a new instance. This does not work for me, as I want to host multiple sites on the same server.

Is it possible to publish to an existing instance using AWS Toolkit, and if so, how do I go about doing it?

Answer 1

As far as I understand it the quick answer is no. This is because the recommended process after launching a new instance is to change the local admin password from that set by AWS. Since the publish to cloud formation only has the AccessKey & Secret Access Key it cannot get the new admin password & as a result cannot connect to an existing instance.

The quick way around this would be to set the instance's security group to allow FTP from your public IP address and then just publish via FTP.

Answer 2

I actually use a plugin called "dispatch", which publishes directly from Visual Studio to the server via FTP. I hate FTP, but that's the nicest solution I've seen so far.

I've been looking for an alternative myself.

The only other option I've used is called AllwaysSync, which is extremely cool. It can sync up a local hard drive with an S3 account. You can then link that s3 directory to CloudFront.

I've been "considering" doing a double sync with that, where I have alwayssync installed on my development box, and installed on my EC2 server. The EC2 machine has AlwaysSync set on auto-sync, so any changes to the S3 directory would get sucked in to the EC2 machine. That directory would be synced up with my local development machine when I initiate the upload.

Still.... It seems so half-as_ed that I've just sat back and waited for Amazon. They usually come up with something.

One thing that I've found works EXCEPTIONALLY well (if you have a fast connection)

I actually use an EC2 server as a workstation and RDP as a thin-client. There's an app called "SplitView" that lets me use 3 monitors at my worstation. I click a shortcut to RDP, my 3 monitors flicker and boom, All my stuff is still there from last-night. If someone steals my laptop.... there's nothing on it at all, except a link to the RDP account.

Anyway, now (for the Amazon sites) I just drag my files over to the live machine and change the IIS settings to targeet the new directory.