Saturday, February 5, 2011

Running Windows on EC2

There seems to be some sort of bug with running Amazon's Windows AMIs on EC2. They "start" pretty quickly, but then you can't log in. Ever. Or at least not after 30 minutes, 4 hours, or days even. The image is configured to generate an admin password on boot and print it in the console log so you can remote desktop into the instances. Except the password NEVER appears in the console log. Which basically means it's useless. It's crazy Amazon actually charges for the time too. Their forum has over 230 posts regarding this issue going back over two years. Amazon's response, if any, is usually "wait longer" or "terminate it and start another one." I started four instances yesterday and waited between 15 minutes and an hour and wasn't able to use a single one. Absurd.