In yet another very exciting development coming from the re-invigorated Movable Type community, Tim Appnel of Appnel Solutions and Blogcast, has put together a Movable Type 4.0 Image on Amazon's EC2 Service (Elastic Compute Cloud).

For those of you who are unfamiliar with EC2, it is a Web service offered by Amazon that allows users to create virtual machines on the Internet quickly and easily. Need a Fedora Server? Click, done. Need a Ubuntu machine? Click, done. And now: need a machine running Movable Type 4? Click, done.

It really is that simple. It's kinda scary. Amazon is simply doing some amazing stuff in the arena of Web services, from EC2 to S3. And they are real. Smug Mug, for example, detailed exactly how they were migrating all of photos to use Amazon's S3 storage solution and it saved themselves millions of dollars in the process. I know Tim has used EC2 to setup obscure testing environments for software he was developing, and I use their web services to maintain a back up of all my personal photos and to power Media Manager. I have read a lot of blog posts from around the Interweb from people speculating on who the "next Google" will be. My money is on Amazon. Amazon: not just for retail anymore kids.

Anyways, back to MT4 and EC2; there is one small catch: EC2 a closed Beta. It requires that you have an Amazon Web Services account that has been granted access to EC2. For those of you have an EC2 account, keep reading this post for instructions on how to access the instance, for everyone else, create an account at Amazon and sign up to use the EC2 service.

I would like to extend my special thanks to Tim for his help, support and especially his ingenuity and initiative in getting this project off the ground. Very cool stuff.



Instructions

For those of you that have gotten into Amazon's EC2 beta, Tim has created a Movable Type 4.0 instance and has shared it with the public so that anyone participating in the EC2 beta can launch it at will.

Here are the vitals:

• AMI ID: ami-5691743f
• URL: http://your.ec2.instance/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi
• MT Username: Melody
• MT Password: Nelson
  

The instance Tim created is completely ready to go, perfect for people wanted to experiment or review the application.

Notes on Configuration

While this instance gives you a working MT system out of the box, there is one configuration setting that you'll need to perform -- you'll need to adjust the URL of the default blog to reflect the domain name or IP that has been assigned to your instance by EC2.

   1. Login to MT
   2. From the Dashboard (the screen you get after logging in)
   3. Select Blog Settings from under the Preferences menu
   4. The click "Publishing" in the left hand navigation
   5. Change the Site URL field to reflect your EC2 instance domain name or IP
   6. Click Save Changes at the bottom

Getting Access to EC2

Tim is one of the lucky ones having gotten access to EC2. Even some of us die hards at Six Apart don't even have out beta accounts (drat!). So Tim has been gracious enough to offer helping people get the access they need should they require it. He can't promise anything, but he might be able to help. Be nice to Tim and don't abuse his good will!