double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

Working in IT I am constantly looking to spend less money and get the same or better results. DoublePositive has been using Amazon’s web services since they released the products several years ago. We started using S3 as soon as it was available. When Windows was released we started using EC2 as well. One of our servers is a small light duty one which uses a lot of CPU but not much RAM. I decided to start out with a small instance, since the use of this server was not real-time. Letting this small instance peg the CPU at 100% for 2-5 minutes at a time was no big deal. We have used it for several years now. A couple of months ago Amazon released an even smaller instance called micro. The hourly cost of the micro instance is a quarter of the small instance cost (3 cents versus 12 cents). It has a burstable CPU to twice what the small has but about half of the RAM. Seeing the price difference and know our server requirements makes the move to the micro instance a no-brainer. The only problem is that my small instance server uses S3 backed storage and the micro instance has to use EBS backed storage. Since there is no migration documentation provided by Amazon this is what I did. In the below steps I use 3 instances to migrate; the live server, temp server and destination server.

1. 1.Bundle existing S3 backed instance, this will give you the latest image so when you start it again the image will have the latest data.

a. Running requisite tools for C drive are a given; defrag, cleaning up and running sdelete

2. 2. Startup additional instance of live server. This is the temp server – I started it up in another security group so I didn’t have any conflicts with the live one

3. Backup server temp server
4. Startup new AMI from Amazon’s EBS images as the destination server in same security group and availability zone as temp server
5. Create image of destination server (this may be an extra step, but each time you create an image it gives a new starting point, so I do this frequently.
6. Connect to temp server and copy over the backup files then restore to destination server
7. Reboot destination
8. Attach any volumes needed and make any other customization to destination server
9. Create image
10. Terminate server and run instance with correct security group
11. Disassociate the Elastic IP address from live server and associate to destination server
12. Test
13. Once working terminate live and temp servers

That should complete the migration and your server will be up and running in a micro instance.

I have been using twitter now for about 3 weeks. I heard about it several years ago. When I checked into it for the first time and read some of the tweets out at that time, I couldn’t understand what the point was. Especially after reading a couple of them that said, “in the car driving up the 101 to San Fran” and “I just walked into Starbucks at Union Square” I was very doubtful about the future of this technology. But over the years I have been hearing more and more about the uses for business which grabbed my attention. Having network security training, I am still wondering how you can have meaningful business updates in twitter without compromising business security whether that be network or insider sales data. Although from a marketing prospective twitter is a free way of updating the world on new products or services. Twitter can create a buzz about these products or services just like a viral video does with YouTube. Here is an interesting example of the use of twitter at ad:tech in New York a couple of months ago.

This is a picture of the screen at the entrance to the conference that is displaying what people were saying about ad:tech in twitter. If you put @adtech in the tweet then it would show up on this screen.
Pretty cool.

Here is another use for twitter although not for business but the programming behind this could be used for updating twitter for some other business reason (for example updating the sales dept. on new client numbers on a flat screen in the office). Although these numbers would be available to the world, simply putting up a number may be cryptic enough to the world but meaningful to the sales staff.


Here is another interesting video about relationship building with twitter. It also gives some good websites to use to keep up to date with what people are tweeting about.


The twitter technology seems pretty simple. From a micro view it is just you updating a status that can only be 140 characters long. From a macro view it can be a view on the here and now in the world. Everyone putting up status updates that may collectively explain something from different viewpoints can have an unbelievable impact on our world and the way we see it. The Hudson River plane crash last week is a great example. Janis Krums posted the first photos of it on twitter.
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/us-airways-crash-rescue-picture-citizen-jouralism-twitter-at-work

Take a look at twitter, it may seem overly simple. But that is the beauty of it.

www.twitter.com.bradfoutz

Brad