How to upload a web Application on Amazon EC2?

Question

Can you please tell me about Amazon EC2. I am having a fully functional small web application -- about 20-25 pages -- completed locally. But now the owners want to get it uploaded on the cloud rather than on a simple server.

So please tell me, should I make any changes in my app? Is there any need to use the PHP SDK on Amazon Cloud. What steps exactly are required to manage the instance on the cloud?

Please provide me some link from where I can get details about this.

I am having my application in PHP and MySQL.

Answer 1

Amazon EC2 is the Elastic computing cloud by Amazon. EC2 is a platform for hosting dedicated servers in the cloud. This differs from platform as a service models, like Google App Engine, where you definitely need to use their SDK.

If your local server is running SUSE, for instance, and the EC2 server is running SUSE, then in theory your app should run the same on both servers. You should be able to access the EC2 server with an SSH connection just like you would a local server. You should be able to copy the app using secure copy (scp).

Additionally, assuming they're running SUSE, you'd need to make sure Apache is configured to run PHP scripts, and you would need to install and configure MySQL, just like you would on your local server.

Your app should run just fine on Amazon. You're still dealing with a dedicated server. The main difference is that you can't physically touch it as it's somewhere in Virginia I think.

With that said, there is an SDK for PHP for Amazon, but it's not immediately clear what purpose it serves. I've run PHP just fine on EC2 without an SDK. But if you are interested, the link is below:

http://aws.amazon.com/sdkforphp/

EDIT:

The main advantage of the PHP API is for cases where the application will integrate with Amazon services. As an example, let's say your application will save files to Amazon S3. S3 uses a REST interface to interact with resources on the S3 Cloud. Instead of writing a wrapper around the REST interface yourself, the PHP API includes some pre-packaged API's that make development faster.

You can learn more here at the Amazon PHP SDK FAQ