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Amazon EC2: How much less userfriendly can you make it?

This morning I read about the new Amazone Elastic Compute Cloud service. It's basically a cluster of Xen VPSes, done right.

At least that's what I thought until I actually tried to use it.

Let's see:

  1. Sign up for AWS
  2. Sign up for S3
  3. Create certs
  4. Download tools
  5. Export 3 EC2 environment variables
  6. Oh, hell. Tools are in java. Switch to windows box since I don't have the patience to figure out installing Java 1.5 on debian right now.
  7. Repeat steps 4-5
  8. Export JAVA_HOME
  9. Run ec2-describe-images
  10. Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/amazon/aes/webservices/client/cmd/DescribeImages

Looks like I get to try to fix the classpath for them. How retro-cool can you get? It's just like 1999!

Bah. Next time, use Python, guys.

update:: Apparently they didn't even bother testing on windows and their script was just plain broken. Way to go.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Shrug. It took me less than twenty minutes - on a Windows machine - from first hearing about EC2 to having an instance up and running apache & mysql with one of my apps on it.
12:23 PM
Anonymous said…
Er, if you're running Debian and you can't figure out how to install Java, perhaps you shouldn't be messing with something like EC2... Or Debian for that matter!
11:36 PM
Anonymous said…
heh. I know this is over a year old, but yeah, if you can't figure out how to install java on debian (which is about as easy as it gets), then I dunno why you decided to tackle this.

It isn't like you need to know java to use these tools. Hell, I hate java(and love Python). But that's hidden from you, with these tools. Gotta think that more people with Windows will have java than python already anyway.

Seriously, what's hard about 'sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin'?
6:13 PM
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