This is a simple guide on how to mount your S3 bucket as a “virtual drive”. This is great for backing up your data to S3, or downloading a bunch of files from S3.

#First, make sure you have the fuse package installed.

#On CentOS, fuse is available from RPMforge

#http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge

#Now install fuse

yum install fuse
modprobe fuse

#Download s3fs and make

cd /usr/local/src
wget http://s3fs.googlecode.com/files/s3fs-r191-source.tar.gz
cd s3fs
make

#Copy the binary to /usr/local/bin (or wherever you prefer)

cp s3fs /usr/local/bin

#Make a mount point

mkdir /mnt/s3drive

#Mount your bucket like this:

s3fs bucketname -o accessKeyId=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX -o secretAccessKey=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX /mnt/s3drive

That’s it ! You can change directory to your virtual drive or start copying files !
Go ahead and use a visual client such as CyberDuck or S3Hub to verify with your own eyes that this actually worked.
Good luck!

After much research, I decided to create a Mysql database server on a ‘instance-store’ small ec2 server, with all the precious Mysql data stored on a EBS volume attached to my server. This way, I could easily create snapshot backups of my databases for FAST backups. Here’s the procedure I decided on. It involves symlinking Mysql config files and data directories onto the EBS volume.

Another trick I used because I needed to migrate about 20 GiB’s of data to get started, was that I initially set up an “X-tra large” instance, with 10 GiB’s RAM to handle the data import. After the data was migrated and imported to my database, I simply terminated my X-Large instance and spun up a small instance connected to the same EBS volume! All the databases were preserved nicely and I did not have to waste money paying for an X-Large instance anymore. This exemplifies the value of thinking in the “cloud” mindset – where you can spin up and down servers in a matter of seconds! Hope this article helps someone else out there!

Great Reference: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1663

# Create small instance (I used the AMI for i.386 CentOS 5.4)

# Create EBS volume and attach it to the EC2 (as /dev/sdh in my example)

# Install mysql-server

yum install mysql-server

# Install xfsprogs so you can format EBS drive with XFS

yum install xfsprogs
modprobe xfs
mkfs.xfs /dev/sdh

# Add to your /etc/fstab so it mounts on boot

echo "/dev/sdh /vol xfs noatime 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
sudo mkdir -m 000 /vol
sudo mount /vol

# Create directories that will store persistant Mysql data

mkdir /vol/etc /vol/lib /vol/log

# Move the mysql config and data files to your newly mounted drive

mv /etc/my.cnf  /vol/etc/
mv /var/lib/mysql /vol/lib/
mv /var/log/mysqld.log /vol/log/

# Symlink the mysql directories so that mysql uses the mounted EBS drive

ln -s /vol/lib/mysql /var/lib/mysql
ln -s /vol/etc/my.cnf /etc/my.cnf
ln -s /vol/log/mysqld.log /var/log/mysqld.log

Now restart your Mysql server and check your logs if you have any errors!

service mysqld start

# If you have errors, watch the logs
tail -f /var/log/mysqld.log

Good luck !