Expanding fast AMI creation to us-east-1 and eu-west-1
2015-10-13 by Axel Fontaine
The main cornerstone to making the transition to Immutable Infrastructure a success is having the capability to produce machine images quickly and reliably These images can then be deployed across environments and ensure perfect environment parity from dev to prod.
CloudCaptain has from the get-go been able to produce minimal machine images tailor-made for your applications on the OS of your choice. No matter whether you choose to use Windows, Mac or Linux, CloudCaptain always produces the same consistent and reliable images in under 10 seconds.
You can then run VirtualBox instances based on those images locally to iterate rapidly.
Once you are satisfied with the results, you can then push these images to the CloudCaptain Vault and convert them to AWS AMIs to be able to launch instances on EC2.
CloudCaptain has always been about an order of magnitude faster than other competing products when performing this conversion in the eu-central-1 region:
Expanding fast AMI creation to us-east-1 and eu-west-1
Starting today, you can now also enjoy the same ultra-fast AMI creation performance in the us-east-1 and eu-west-1 regions. No need to change anything on your end. Simply fire up your CloudCaptain Client and start enjoying the ultra-fast performance now:
> boxfuse run hello -env=prod Creating axelfontaine/hello ... Pushing axelfontaine/hello:1.0 ... Verifying axelfontaine/hello:1.0 ... Waiting for AWS to create an AMI for axelfontaine/hello:1.0 in us-east-1 (this may take up to 50 seconds) ... AMI created in 00:45.467s in us-east-1 -> ami-c1743ea4 Creating Elastic IP ... Mapping hello-axelfontaine.boxfuse.io to 52.22.39.178 ... Creating security group boxsg-axelfontaine/hello:1.0 ... Launching t2.micro instance of axelfontaine/hello:1.0 (ami-c1743ea4) in prod (us-east-1) ... Instance launched in 00:48.109s -> i-ec71ce53 Waiting for AWS to boot Instance i-ec71ce53 and Payload to start at https://54.165.227.247/ ... Payload started in 00:43.000s -> https://54.165.227.247/ Remapping Elastic IP 52.22.39.178 to i-ec71ce53 ... Waiting 15s for AWS to complete Elastic IP Zero Downtime transition ... Deployment completed successfully. axelfontaine/hello:1.0 is up and running at https://hello-axelfontaine.boxfuse.io
These are the current AMI creation times across all regions:
| ap-northeast-1 | Less than 5 minutes |
| ap-southeast-1 | Less than 5 minutes |
| ap-southeast-2 | Less than 5 minutes |
| eu-central-1 | Less than 60 seconds |
| eu-west-1 | Less than 60 seconds |
| sa-east-1 | Less than 5 minutes |
| us-east-1 | Less than 60 seconds |
| us-west-1 | Less than 5 minutes |
| us-west-2 | Less than 5 minutes |
As CloudCaptain expands its footprint, further regions will be optimized for fast deployment. The order will be based on based on customer usage and demand. This does not affect the runtime speed of your instance, which is determined by the instance type you selected.
Conclusion
We have taken CloudCaptain's ultra-fast AMI creation capabilities in the eu-central-1 region and expanded them to the us-east-1 and eu-west-1 regions. No change is necessary on your end. Simply use CloudCaptain to create AMIs and deploy applications as you always do and automatically start enjoying the absolute fastest way to create AMIs today.
Have fun and keep on deploying JVM applications to AWS with ease and pleasure!
And if you haven't already, sign up for your CloudCaptain account now. All you need is a GitHub user and you'll be up and running in no time. The CloudCaptain free plan aligns perfectly with the AWS free tier, so you can deploy your JVM application to EC2 completely free.