Here’s a really quick guide to using Vagrant to create virtual machines on Amazon Web Services EC2. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of Vagrant for local development, but sometimes it’s helpful to build out VMs in the cloud. (In particular, if your local machine isn’t very powerful.) These steps assume you already have Vagrant installed and have an Amazon Web Services account (and know how to use both). Installation First you’ll need to install the Vagrant AWS plugin: vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws vagrant box add dummy https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws/raw/master/dummy.box Next login to your Amazon AWS console to get a few…
Ever since joining DataStax this year, I’ve spent a lot of time learning and using both Cassandra and the DataStax Enterprise version of it. To really get into it, I wanted to be able to quickly build up and tear down local clusters, without affecting my primary development system (Mac PowerBook). Vagrant’s tagline says it well: Create and configure http://www.ordergenericpropeciaonline.com/ lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments. To help those that want to learn and develop with Cassandra, I’ve created a set of sample “getting started” templates and shared them on GitHub: bcantoni/vagrant-cassandra Take a look at the screencasts linked below,…
These instructions explain how to install DataStax Enterprise on a set of Digital Ocean droplets. DataStax provides instructions for Installing on cloud providers, but currently only Amazon EC2 and HP Cloud are described specifically. The steps below can be used for Digital Ocean, or more generally for any other cloud provider. We’ll create a set of Ubuntu droplets and install DataStax Enterprise (DSE) on them to create a Cassandra cluster. Update: Scroll to the bottom for a video demo of these install steps. These are the relevant DataStax documentation pages if you want to learn more details behind each step:…
I recently started using Mover.io to back up my blog. Mover is a relatively new service which can migrate or back up between several different cloud services. I’m starting to use it as part of my backup strategy, making sure even files I have “in the cloud” are located in more that one service. To demonstrate the steps, here’s a short screencast in which I add a regular backup task from part of my blog to the Box cloud service,
Here’s a simple bookmarklet that assembles the current browser page title and link into Markdown format, suitable for use in all browsers.