Quickstarting OE

Background

Amazon offers pay-as-you-use cloud servers. You can attach disks to virtual machines just like you would a physical machine. Disk images can be shared between users, and they are identified by a number knows as an "AMI".

Chumby has pre-built an OE image, so that all of the packages are resident and built, thus allowing you to get started on developing your application right away, without having to spend hours configuring and downloading the source code for the entire universe. You can use these AMIs as a starting point for development; and if you mess up, you can always restart the instance from a fresh image again (but back up your changes before you do that!).

Amazon offers several tiers of machines, with varying prices http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/. We recommend using a "medium high-CPU" or "small" instance type, which cost $0.17 and $0.085 per hour, respectively (pricing as of April 2011). Building is a very CPU and memory-intensive task, and on a "medium high-CPU" instance, a full build from clean takes 6 hours to complete.

Amazon also offers a free "micro" tier, but there are a number of restrictions on it, including a very tight 600 MB RAM limit, and a 10 GB EBS disk limit. Open embedded barely fits in a 10GB EBS volume, and in fact will not build from clean in 600 MB of RAM. However, we offer the pre-built image for micro tiers for users who just want to evaluate the solution to see if this is something they want to pay for. On a micro tier you can build a couple small packages and re-create images, sufficient for a quick hack or evaluation, but we do not recommend doing serious development on a micro instance.

How to create an instance

First, register for the Amazon EC2 service http://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/subscription/index.html?productCode=AmazonEC2. The process is fairly self-explanatory, and they do require a credit card to register. I believe you can even link this to an existing consumer/personal Amazon account, but we haven't tested this.

Once you are approved for an account, you will see a console similar to the following.