How can I deploy my .NET application on Amazon EC2?

Question

I have a .NET Windows service and a .NET Web Application that I would like to deploy on my Amazon EC2 Windows 2008 instances. At this point, all I need to do is copy the zipped files to the EC2 field and the remote desktop to the EC2 instance and complete the deployment.

To do this, I tried LogMeIn Hamachi2 to create a P2P VPN and use RoboCopy to copy files, however it seems that Hamachi is not working on Windows EC2.

What is your solution for deploying your .NET applications on instances of Windows EC2? I want to avoid using an FTP server on the box to get my files on the server and not have a VPN server (such as OpenVPN) launched to solve the cloud-based VPN.

Perhaps I can find an easy way to use Amazon S3 as a strategy? Any ideas? Suggestions?

Answer 1

We use http://filezilla-project.org/ . You can use SFTP and work on an alternate port, and this should not be too bad.

Theoretically, you can use an S3 client, such as WebDrive . I used WebDrive for WebDAV and it works very well. Did not try this for S3.

I think this leads me to another option. You can start WebDAV using IIS [ http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/350/installing-and-configuring-webdav-on-iis-7/ ]. WebDAV can be launched via HTTPS so that it is safe enough.

EDIT

Also How to access local files on the remote desktop .... Then you can use Beyond Compare to make changes. Please note that Beyond Compare supports FTP as well.

Answer 2

I am considering this at the moment and have quite a few projects that we are deploying on Amazon (Windows Service X2, IIS Web Sites X 3 (Dev, Test, Prod), MSSQL Server, etc.) and we are looking at RSync for deployment. At the moment, the RSync server lives in each of the mailboxes, but the plan should be to have a small Linux box (possibly a free browser) and click on files. then, using samba share, we should be able to pull from the server.

My plan will be that a package or PowerShell file will kill the Windows service, copy the files from the Linux window, and start the Windows service.

Answer 3

Finally, I decided to use a JungleDisk-based solution, using the S3 bucket as a drive at both ends.

Answer 4

We run our web applications on Elastic Beanstalk and deploy it using awsdeploy.exe . It does deployment in environments using AutoScaling , which can be difficult because you do not know the IP addresses of all your servers. It also simplifies the management and monitoring of your environment. See the previous discussion of this here .

Deploying Windows services is more complicated. We use PowerShell Remoting to stop services, then Web Deploy to synchronize files between servers, then Remoting to start all services.