How can I deploy my .NET app to Amazon EC2?

Question

I have a .NET Windows service and a .NET Web Application that I would like to deploy to my Amazon EC2 Windows 2008 instances. At this point, all I need to do is to copy the zipped files across to the EC2 box and remote desktop to the EC2 instance and finish the deployment.

In order to do this, I have tried LogMeIn Hamachi2 to create a P2P VPN and use RoboCopy to copy the files, however it seems Hamachi doesn't work on Windows EC2.

What is your solution for deploying your .NET apps to Windows EC2 instances? I want to avoid running an FTP server on the box just to get my files up on the server and don't have a VPN server (like OpenVPN) running to run a cloud based VPN solution.

Perhaps I can find a simple way of using Amazon S3 as a strategy? Any ideas? Suggestions?

Answer 1

We use http://filezilla-project.org/. You can use SFTP and run on an alternate port, and that shouldn't be too bad.

Theoretically you can use an S3 client like WebDrive. I've used WebDrive for WebDAV and it works very well. Haven't tried it for S3.

Which I guess, brings me to another option. You can run a WebDAV with IIS [ http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/350/installing-and-configuring-webdav-on-iis-7/ ]. WebDAV can be run over HTTPS so that should be reasonably secure.

EDIT

Also How to gain access to local files in a remote desktop.... You can then use Beyond Compare to push your changes. Note that Beyond Compare supports FTP compares too.

Answer 2

I am looking into this currently, and have quite a few projects we are deploying to Amazon (Windows Service X2, IIS Web Sites X 3 (Dev, Test, Prod), MSSQL Server, etc) and we are looking at RSync for the deploy. At the moment, the RSync server lives on each of the boxes, but the plan will be to have a Small Linux box (free teir probably) and push files to that. then using a samba share, we should be able to pull from the server.

My plan would be that a batch or PowerShell file will kill the windows service, copy the files from the linux box, and then start the windows service.