Breaking into the Amazon cloud.

So last night I sat down with the intention of writing the code to allow for character select. Instead I started thinking about reworking my code to work with Photon instead of SmartFoxServer 2x. I still haven't made up my mind about either technology. I like how easily Hibernate works with NetBeans to quickly allow me to create my classes and get started. The counter is that I would like my messages and common code to be written once, instead of once in C# and Java. That battle will have to wait until later.

As I was saying. I sat down with the intention of working on the character select code. Instead I ran across a post about people using the Amazon cloud to host a Photon server, so I figured I've give it a look and see what all the fuss was about.

Amazon has a great starting deal. You can get a micro instance with a linux server with 613MB of memory, 8 GB of their EBS storage, an Elastic IP - an IP address that can be repointed to any instance you are running so if a server dies you can switch to a new one, and something like 10GB of output. All of this for free for an entire year.

I figured what the heck, sign up for an account, get a linux server to admin for a year. I can play around with the server and maybe do something cool. I have installed xampp and secured it following the linux instructions from apache friends. Next I'm going to see if it already has Java installed and if so, I'm going to look into putting on SmartFoxServer.

This is an interesting project I plan on exploring and maybe something will come of it. I'll just have to find out.