As Dave Winer so presciently reminded us all today, “New slogan: When in doubt, blog.” It has been toooo long since I blogged, and I was (am) in doubt.

Situation : moving websites from a monolothic AWS server in US East to a more highly available (and perhaps better performing, as a bonus) architecture. This cluster of machines were set up with Ubuntu 10.0.4 LTS (which I discovered means “Long Term Support” or so.) That would have been the latest available at the time.

Without changing everything, it seems prudent to move up to Ubuntu’s v12 LTS release, to avoid any early forced migrations when support ends.

So I was searching for AMIs and all I could find in the Japan region, Ubuntu 64 bit (I see no need for a webserver to remain 32 bit – do you have a need?) were the Bitnami releases. Nothing against them, but that’s more change than I need ;^)

A few days later I have discovered the Canonical AMIs linked in a blog post about the new Japanese region – just what I was looking for!

Now for a quick teardown of the old server, replace it with this one (and re-attach the elastic IP address

Next : how to scale the hell (or at least make Highly Available) out of a WordPress 3 Install