Its been 2 months since I uploaded my last update to my website. Since I've moved to Abu-Dhabi, my new bank account is created and its in local currency. As I want to keep my Abu-Dhabi expenses separate, I created a new account. I downloaded my local bank statement and tried uploading it.
I was hoping it would work seamlessly but alas! All of this because I was perhaps lazy and stupid not to implement the mm/dd/YYYY format in my code. As in India, all dates are in dd/mm/YYYY, I did not implement it and so the statement upload failed. The good thing is I knew immediately why the failure occurred. I also corrected in about an hour and then uploaded the new War to Amazon Beanstalk.
Ha! So, it showed Uploading and Deploying for a long time and finally it gave a warning message that the action has timed out, but not to worry it'll finish in some time. Okay, I said. After a while I got a mail saying the new version was deployed. Cool! I ran the application only to find out it was still broken. I kept trying uploading it as war for some time using the web interface and then finally got Amazon Eclipse plug in installed to see if I could use Eclipse based interface. But no luck. However, the application continued to run fine in its 2 month old version with all monitoring parameters Green.
I then tried restarting the app server using the beanstalk web interface. Again, the same thing. The action times out with reassuring message that the script will eventually run and finally you see that the action is completed on the web console but there is no impact on the EC2 server.
As luck would have it, an Amazon sales person tried to reach out to me to see if they can expand their offerings to me. I got back to him with this problem and asked him to get it resolved. He asked me to log the issue on the "vibrant" amazon AWS community forum and I'd surely get a response.
Okay, I did that too. And after 3 days the query is still unanswered. So much for the vibrancy.
I finally decided to take the matters in my own hands and deal directly with the EC2 instance, instead of using beanstalk. I logged into EC2 instance and saw a lot of OS / Applications updates pending. Crossing my fingers I ran them. They ran fine but after they'd run, I tried deploying again. This time the Site stopped responding completely. Ouch! I brought down my own website. Whatever was working till now had also stopped. In desperation, I used the old Windows Trick on the Linux Server called, "Reboot the Server".
And viola! the site came up, I could upload the new war and it worked fine.
So, here is a piece of advice to Amazon AWS. There are a lot of individual users, small firms that use AWS. Amazon offers them absolutely no support. They have to live on the forums, which for all its vibrancy, pass up a defects / questions logged. The paid model starts with $49 a month fee. My entire bill of hosting the server is $50. And its a personal expense not a corporate one. How could I subscribe to $49 plan?
Anyhow, here this ends. Perhaps, I'll try and find another host for my site. Someone who cares about $50 a month revenue and helps out its users with troubleshooting instead of turning them away.
I was hoping it would work seamlessly but alas! All of this because I was perhaps lazy and stupid not to implement the mm/dd/YYYY format in my code. As in India, all dates are in dd/mm/YYYY, I did not implement it and so the statement upload failed. The good thing is I knew immediately why the failure occurred. I also corrected in about an hour and then uploaded the new War to Amazon Beanstalk.
Ha! So, it showed Uploading and Deploying for a long time and finally it gave a warning message that the action has timed out, but not to worry it'll finish in some time. Okay, I said. After a while I got a mail saying the new version was deployed. Cool! I ran the application only to find out it was still broken. I kept trying uploading it as war for some time using the web interface and then finally got Amazon Eclipse plug in installed to see if I could use Eclipse based interface. But no luck. However, the application continued to run fine in its 2 month old version with all monitoring parameters Green.
I then tried restarting the app server using the beanstalk web interface. Again, the same thing. The action times out with reassuring message that the script will eventually run and finally you see that the action is completed on the web console but there is no impact on the EC2 server.
As luck would have it, an Amazon sales person tried to reach out to me to see if they can expand their offerings to me. I got back to him with this problem and asked him to get it resolved. He asked me to log the issue on the "vibrant" amazon AWS community forum and I'd surely get a response.
Okay, I did that too. And after 3 days the query is still unanswered. So much for the vibrancy.
I finally decided to take the matters in my own hands and deal directly with the EC2 instance, instead of using beanstalk. I logged into EC2 instance and saw a lot of OS / Applications updates pending. Crossing my fingers I ran them. They ran fine but after they'd run, I tried deploying again. This time the Site stopped responding completely. Ouch! I brought down my own website. Whatever was working till now had also stopped. In desperation, I used the old Windows Trick on the Linux Server called, "Reboot the Server".
And viola! the site came up, I could upload the new war and it worked fine.
So, here is a piece of advice to Amazon AWS. There are a lot of individual users, small firms that use AWS. Amazon offers them absolutely no support. They have to live on the forums, which for all its vibrancy, pass up a defects / questions logged. The paid model starts with $49 a month fee. My entire bill of hosting the server is $50. And its a personal expense not a corporate one. How could I subscribe to $49 plan?
Anyhow, here this ends. Perhaps, I'll try and find another host for my site. Someone who cares about $50 a month revenue and helps out its users with troubleshooting instead of turning them away.
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