Hi Everyone,
For those of you may be interested, I have setup and configured an
Amazon EC2 instance of DHIS2 2.1 /Tomcat/Apache/Postgres. If you would
like to utilize the instance for your own purposes, let me know, and I
can give you more details of how you can get the image.
Regards,
Jason
--
Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
tel:+260974901293
Yes, please 
Started myself but never got much further than ubuntu...
Have you looked at costs for ec2 vs other options like linode?
Jo
Den 12. mars 2011 kl. 12.09 skrev Jason Pickering:
Hi Everyone,
For those of you may be interested, I have setup and configured an
Amazon EC2 instance of DHIS2 2.1 /Tomcat/Apache/Postgres. If you would
like to utilize the instance for your own purposes, let me know, and I
can give you more details of how you can get the image.
I really have no idea about costs. I need to figure this out as part
of a budgeting exercise, and compare against Linode
Linode are priced differently. EC2 is based on usage, where as Linonde
is more or less a fixed cost per month. I have DHIS2 running on both
at the moment, in order to compare the differences between the two in
terms of performance and costs.
I guess the obvious advantage is scalability. I am using the Amazon
RDS as a backend, so I guess that scaling the front-end and backend is
going to be possible. It is pretty simple to scale Linode as well, and
the pricing is a lot more transparent, but I am not sure in terms of
how it will perform or scale when compared to EC2.
I think an EC2 micro instance is for the most part free, so it is easy
to get started experimenting. This is what i chose for this image. You
can also install MySQL/Postgres on the instance and not use the RDS
backend. The RDS service costs, but it seems to be very unclear how
much it costs. Perhaps after a month's usage or so, I would be able to
provide more details.
Another issue is how to scale this app. Multiple small instances which
are load balanced against each other, or bigger instances? I have
essentially no experience with this stuff ,so it would be good to get
others feedback.
Let me clean the AMI up a bit and i can provide details.
Regards,
Jason
On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 6:00 PM, Jo Størset <storset@gmail.com> wrote:
Den 12. mars 2011 kl. 12.09 skrev Jason Pickering:
Hi Everyone,
For those of you may be interested, I have setup and configured an
Amazon EC2 instance of DHIS2 2.1 /Tomcat/Apache/Postgres. If you would
like to utilize the instance for your own purposes, let me know, and I
can give you more details of how you can get the image.Yes, please
Started myself but never got much further than ubuntu...
Have you looked at costs for ec2 vs other options like linode?
Jo
--
Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
tel:+260974901293
Looking more into costs, it seems to be quite significant. Costs are
calculated based on instance-hour. If it is up and running, it is
billed. Testing on a Micro instance proved that performance is pretty
unacceptably slow. Scaling up to an instance with 17 GB of memory
improved things significantly. Latency with the RDS service seems
significant but could be related to the relatively small size of the
database (5 GB). Keeping an instance up and running 24X7 for a month
will cost you several hundred bucks it seems, significantly more than
Linode.
If you want to test yourself, give me your Amazon WS customer ID, and
I will make the AMI available to you.
Regards,
Jason
On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 6:11 PM, Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@gmail.com> wrote:
I really have no idea about costs. I need to figure this out as part
of a budgeting exercise, and compare against LinodeLinode are priced differently. EC2 is based on usage, where as Linonde
is more or less a fixed cost per month. I have DHIS2 running on both
at the moment, in order to compare the differences between the two in
terms of performance and costs.I guess the obvious advantage is scalability. I am using the Amazon
RDS as a backend, so I guess that scaling the front-end and backend is
going to be possible. It is pretty simple to scale Linode as well, and
the pricing is a lot more transparent, but I am not sure in terms of
how it will perform or scale when compared to EC2.I think an EC2 micro instance is for the most part free, so it is easy
to get started experimenting. This is what i chose for this image. You
can also install MySQL/Postgres on the instance and not use the RDS
backend. The RDS service costs, but it seems to be very unclear how
much it costs. Perhaps after a month's usage or so, I would be able to
provide more details.Another issue is how to scale this app. Multiple small instances which
are load balanced against each other, or bigger instances? I have
essentially no experience with this stuff ,so it would be good to get
others feedback.Let me clean the AMI up a bit and i can provide details.
Regards,
JasonOn Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 6:00 PM, Jo Størset <storset@gmail.com> wrote:
Den 12. mars 2011 kl. 12.09 skrev Jason Pickering:
Hi Everyone,
For those of you may be interested, I have setup and configured an
Amazon EC2 instance of DHIS2 2.1 /Tomcat/Apache/Postgres. If you would
like to utilize the instance for your own purposes, let me know, and I
can give you more details of how you can get the image.Yes, please
Have you looked at costs for ec2 vs other options like linode?
Jo
--
Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
tel:+260974901293
--
Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
tel:+260974901293
Took it off-list, but maybe others are also interested?
Oops.
Looking more into costs, it seems to be quite significant. Costs are
calculated based on instance-hour. If it is up and running, it is
billed. Testing on a Micro instance proved that performance is pretty
unacceptably slow. Scaling up to an instance with 17 GB of memory
improved things significantly. Latency with the RDS service seems
significant but could be related to the relatively small size of the
database (5 GB). Keeping an instance up and running 24X7 for a month
will cost you several hundred bucks it seems, significantly more than
Linode.How did you go about calculating this? Linode is comparable to running EC2 without RDS, I guess, I get $ 87.84/month for a one year large reserved instance, that is
There is a cost calculator..Simple Monthly Calculator
and I was reading this.
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=114409
What - Linode - EC2
----
Price - $159.95 - $ 87.84
Memory - 4096MB - 7.5 GB
Disk - 128GB - 850 GB
Processing - ? - 4 EC2 Compute Units (1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor)
It is a bit difficult to compare, but I'm not sure amazon don't make sense even for stand-alone instances. And for flexibility and services offered, especially if running >several services in coordination, it certainly seems to make sense. While a micro instance has "low" IO performance a large instance has "high" IO performance, so >I think your latency issues might go away as well...
The interesting thing is that the MicroInstances with the RDS backend
actually work quite well for data entry, which is the main use case
for me considering Amazon (and various regulatory issues). I am
thinking that if we created a stripped down version of the DHIS war,
which consisted only of the stuff needed by data entry personell,
micro instances which are easily created and load balanced could serve
as a powerful way to scale up and down based on demand. This is of
course possible as well with LinNode, but it is just so easy on Amazon
to do this. I doubt going to support things like the data mart, import
and other memory hungry tasks, but it is simple to create a new
(temporary) instance which could be used for these "heavier" tasks.
Am I missing any significant details?
I am not sure at this point. I think we need to do some testing.
If you want to test yourself, give me your Amazon WS customer ID, and
I will make the AMI available to you.
Done. Obviously, there are some issues related to the RDS backend.
THis is obviously connected to my instance, which I assume you should
have no authority for. It would be nice to have a stripped down AMI
with just Tomcat and HTTP (for the reverse proxy). Might perform
better. It seems you can import virtual machines into Amazon as well,
but have not figured out this part yet.
Regards,
Jason
On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 2:18 PM, Jo Størset <storset@gmail.com> wrote:
Den 13. mars 2011 kl. 10.54 skrev Jason Pickering:
--
Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
tel:+260974901293
Another experiment I conducted over the weekend was a hybrid approach.
Linnode seems to be quite good at being persistent and is relatively
cheap. I think the draw back is of it is not at all as easily
scalable as Amazon. I tried a setup where I use a Linode as the
backend DB and then a cluster of AWS instances(which acted as the
DHIS2 frontend) connected to the remote Postgresql database (running
on Linode). Obviously, latency is an issue here as packets have to get
out of Amazon and to Linode and back, but I guess these pipes are
pretty big.
The experiment worked quite well. Again, not really sure if this
architecture would be advantageous, but perhaps it would be a simple
way to scale up and down capacity depending on peaks of usage (for
instance during the data entry period). Would be nice to test if we
could. Did any one ever come up with a way to do load testing on DHIS?
I heard rumors about Selenium or Jmeter, but not really sure if there
is anything out there.
Regards,
Jason
On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 2:43 PM, Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 2:18 PM, Jo Størset <storset@gmail.com> wrote:
Took it off-list, but maybe others are also interested?
Oops.
Den 13. mars 2011 kl. 10.54 skrev Jason Pickering:
Looking more into costs, it seems to be quite significant. Costs are
calculated based on instance-hour. If it is up and running, it is
billed. Testing on a Micro instance proved that performance is pretty
unacceptably slow. Scaling up to an instance with 17 GB of memory
improved things significantly. Latency with the RDS service seems
significant but could be related to the relatively small size of the
database (5 GB). Keeping an instance up and running 24X7 for a month
will cost you several hundred bucks it seems, significantly more than
Linode.How did you go about calculating this? Linode is comparable to running EC2 without RDS, I guess, I get $ 87.84/month for a one year large reserved instance, that is
There is a cost calculator..Simple Monthly Calculator
and I was reading this.
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=114409
What - Linode - EC2
----
Price - $159.95 - $ 87.84
Memory - 4096MB - 7.5 GB
Disk - 128GB - 850 GB
Processing - ? - 4 EC2 Compute Units (1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor)It is a bit difficult to compare, but I'm not sure amazon don't make sense even for stand-alone instances. And for flexibility and services offered, especially if running >several services in coordination, it certainly seems to make sense. While a micro instance has "low" IO performance a large instance has "high" IO performance, so >I think your latency issues might go away as well...
The interesting thing is that the MicroInstances with the RDS backend
actually work quite well for data entry, which is the main use case
for me considering Amazon (and various regulatory issues). I am
thinking that if we created a stripped down version of the DHIS war,
which consisted only of the stuff needed by data entry personell,
micro instances which are easily created and load balanced could serve
as a powerful way to scale up and down based on demand. This is of
course possible as well with LinNode, but it is just so easy on Amazon
to do this. I doubt going to support things like the data mart, import
and other memory hungry tasks, but it is simple to create a new
(temporary) instance which could be used for these "heavier" tasks.Am I missing any significant details?
I am not sure at this point. I think we need to do some testing.
If you want to test yourself, give me your Amazon WS customer ID, and
I will make the AMI available to you.
Done. Obviously, there are some issues related to the RDS backend.
THis is obviously connected to my instance, which I assume you should
have no authority for. It would be nice to have a stripped down AMI
with just Tomcat and HTTP (for the reverse proxy). Might perform
better. It seems you can import virtual machines into Amazon as well,
but have not figured out this part yet.Regards,
Jason--
Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
tel:+260974901293
--
Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
tel:+260974901293
More cool stuff with Amazon Web Services. In my last experiment with AWS, I have utilized the “Elastic Beanstalk”. A little bit strange to get your head around but here it is…
http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
So, basically, what you do is you upload a war file. AWS then deploys it to a selected environment, creates auto scaling triggers, elastic load balancers, and all of that stuff that most people (including me!!) have no idea. The basic idea is that as the demand on the app grows, then you need to scale it. But wit the “Elastic beanstalk” it does all of this for you. It costs nothing more than all the normal services on Amazon and takes care of the auto-scaling.
I assume, it would be possible somehow to embed the connection properties to a database somewhere inside the WAR file? You do not have direct access to the environment, so there is no way to specify a database connection through the hibernate.properties file, but it seems possible to do this somehow.
So, basically, all you have to do is to upload a war file, and boom…you are in the cloud and have to do nothing basically in terms of configuration.
Check it out here
http://dhis2.elasticbeanstalk.com/
This is a really stripped down WAR that does nothing. I was only going to use it for a fleet of data entry interfaces to a cloud-backed amazon RDS datasource, but need to figure out first how to specify the connection to the DB inside the WAR file itself.
Regards,
Jason
On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Jason Pickering jason.p.pickering@gmail.com wrote:
Another experiment I conducted over the weekend was a hybrid approach.
Linnode seems to be quite good at being persistent and is relatively
cheap. I think the draw back is of it is not at all as easily
scalable as Amazon. I tried a setup where I use a Linode as the
backend DB and then a cluster of AWS instances(which acted as the
DHIS2 frontend) connected to the remote Postgresql database (running
on Linode). Obviously, latency is an issue here as packets have to get
out of Amazon and to Linode and back, but I guess these pipes are
pretty big.
The experiment worked quite well. Again, not really sure if this
architecture would be advantageous, but perhaps it would be a simple
way to scale up and down capacity depending on peaks of usage (for
instance during the data entry period). Would be nice to test if we
could. Did any one ever come up with a way to do load testing on DHIS?
I heard rumors about Selenium or Jmeter, but not really sure if there
is anything out there.
Regards,
Jason
On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 2:43 PM, Jason Pickering > > jason.p.pickering@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 2:18 PM, Jo Størset storset@gmail.com wrote:
Took it off-list, but maybe others are also interested?
Oops.
Den 13. mars 2011 kl. 10.54 skrev Jason Pickering:
Looking more into costs, it seems to be quite significant. Costs are
calculated based on instance-hour. If it is up and running, it is
billed. Testing on a Micro instance proved that performance is pretty
unacceptably slow. Scaling up to an instance with 17 GB of memory
improved things significantly. Latency with the RDS service seems
significant but could be related to the relatively small size of the
database (5 GB). Keeping an instance up and running 24X7 for a month
will cost you several hundred bucks it seems, significantly more than
Linode.
How did you go about calculating this? Linode is comparable to running EC2 without RDS, I guess, I get $ 87.84/month for a one year large reserved instance, that is
There is a cost calculator…http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
and I was reading this.
What - Linode - EC2
Price - $159.95 - $ 87.84
Memory - 4096MB - 7.5 GB
Disk - 128GB - 850 GB
Processing - ? - 4 EC2 Compute Units (1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor)
It is a bit difficult to compare, but I’m not sure amazon don’t make sense even for stand-alone instances. And for flexibility and services offered, especially if running >several services in coordination, it certainly seems to make sense. While a micro instance has “low” IO performance a large instance has “high” IO performance, so >I think your latency issues might go away as well…
The interesting thing is that the MicroInstances with the RDS backend
actually work quite well for data entry, which is the main use case
for me considering Amazon (and various regulatory issues). I am
thinking that if we created a stripped down version of the DHIS war,
which consisted only of the stuff needed by data entry personell,
micro instances which are easily created and load balanced could serve
as a powerful way to scale up and down based on demand. This is of
course possible as well with LinNode, but it is just so easy on Amazon
to do this. I doubt going to support things like the data mart, import
and other memory hungry tasks, but it is simple to create a new
(temporary) instance which could be used for these “heavier” tasks.
Am I missing any significant details?
I am not sure at this point. I think we need to do some testing.
If you want to test yourself, give me your Amazon WS customer ID, and
I will make the AMI available to you.
Done. Obviously, there are some issues related to the RDS backend.
THis is obviously connected to my instance, which I assume you should
have no authority for. It would be nice to have a stripped down AMI
with just Tomcat and HTTP (for the reverse proxy). Might perform
better. It seems you can import virtual machines into Amazon as well,
but have not figured out this part yet.
Regards,
Jason
–
Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
tel:+260974901293
–
Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
tel:+260974901293
–
Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
tel:+260974901293
This stuff is interesting. To keep your experiments going for now you can modify the dhis-support-hibernate/src/main/resources/hibernate-default.properties file (will be located at the root of dhis-support-hibernate.jar inside WEB-INF/lib in the WAR).
On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 4:58 PM, Jason Pickering jason.p.pickering@gmail.com wrote:
More cool stuff with Amazon Web Services. In my last experiment with AWS, I have utilized the “Elastic Beanstalk”. A little bit strange to get your head around but here it is…
http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
So, basically, what you do is you upload a war file. AWS then deploys it to a selected environment, creates auto scaling triggers, elastic load balancers, and all of that stuff that most people (including me!!) have no idea. The basic idea is that as the demand on the app grows, then you need to scale it. But wit the “Elastic beanstalk” it does all of this for you. It costs nothing more than all the normal services on Amazon and takes care of the auto-scaling.
I assume, it would be possible somehow to embed the connection properties to a database somewhere inside the WAR file? You do not have direct access to the environment, so there is no way to specify a database connection through the hibernate.properties file, but it seems possible to do this somehow.
So, basically, all you have to do is to upload a war file, and boom…you are in the cloud and have to do nothing basically in terms of configuration.
Check it out here
http://dhis2.elasticbeanstalk.com/
This is a really stripped down WAR that does nothing. I was only going to use it for a fleet of data entry interfaces to a cloud-backed amazon RDS datasource, but need to figure out first how to specify the connection to the DB inside the WAR file itself.
From the Amazon web service stanpoint, it woud be idea to have a completely standaalone package which deploys itself, or the use of a parameter which is documented here …http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/ug/index.html?using-features.managing.db.html which can be used to connect to a persistent source, like a remote Postgres DB or the Amazon RDS server. Being able to pass a paramater directly to the instance could be useful from the AWS stand point.
Will give it a try anyway. Thanks.
Regards,
Jason
2011/3/15 Lars Helge Øverland larshelge@gmail.com
On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 4:58 PM, Jason Pickering jason.p.pickering@gmail.com wrote:
More cool stuff with Amazon Web Services. In my last experiment with AWS, I have utilized the “Elastic Beanstalk”. A little bit strange to get your head around but here it is…
So, basically, what you do is you upload a war file. AWS then deploys it to a selected environment, creates auto scaling triggers, elastic load balancers, and all of that stuff that most people (including me!!) have no idea. The basic idea is that as the demand on the app grows, then you need to scale it. But wit the “Elastic beanstalk” it does all of this for you. It costs nothing more than all the normal services on Amazon and takes care of the auto-scaling.
I assume, it would be possible somehow to embed the connection properties to a database somewhere inside the WAR file? You do not have direct access to the environment, so there is no way to specify a database connection through the hibernate.properties file, but it seems possible to do this somehow.
So, basically, all you have to do is to upload a war file, and boom…you are in the cloud and have to do nothing basically in terms of configuration.
Check it out here
http://dhis2.elasticbeanstalk.com/
This is a really stripped down WAR that does nothing. I was only going to use it for a fleet of data entry interfaces to a cloud-backed amazon RDS datasource, but need to figure out first how to specify the connection to the DB inside the WAR file itself.
This stuff is interesting. To keep your experiments going for now you can modify the dhis-support-hibernate/src/main/resources/hibernate-default.properties file (will be located at the root of dhis-support-hibernate.jar inside WEB-INF/lib in the WAR).
–
Jason P. Pickering
email: jason.p.pickering@gmail.com
tel:+260974901293