Turnkey Ubuntu-Based Linux for Amazon Cloud: Review

A platform for test driving the cloud

Turnkey Linux is an excellent option for individuals or organisations looking to test drive and deploy open-source Web applications covered by the project. It would serve well as a platform for building Web applications atop popular open-source stacks: there are appliances available for generic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl), Ruby on Rails and Django stacks, among others.

The project’s mix of administration tools provides comfortable options for newcomers and old hands at Linux administration alike, and the platform’s wide deployment and backup options make it easy to focus on the application at the top of the stack.

All Turnkey Linux appliances are freely downloadable, and pricing for S3 storage and EC2 hosting is based strictly on use, at the same rates that Amazon Web Services charges directly. The Turnkey developers have considered charging a ten percent premium atop the EC2 rates to help fund the project, but as yet have not put any such premium into place.

Turnkey Linux appliances don’t use EBS volumes for their own system files, instead relying on EC2’s temporary storage for that purpose. The backup function takes away some of the need for persistent storage, but the “no EBS by default” arrangement makes Turnkey Linux appliances incompatible with Amazon’s lowest-cost, “micro” instances, which are great for trying out most Web applications.

Testing Turnkey Linux

I tested Turnkey Linux with Mediawiki and WordPress appliances, which I deployed on Oracle’s VirtualBox 4.0 running on my notebook, on the VMware vSphere infrastructure in our lab and on Amazon’s EC2 cloud hosting service.

In each of these environments, the Turnkey Linux appliance automatically downloaded and installed the latest Ubuntu security updates at boot time. It also offered a simple command-line administration console through which I could configure networking and find the addresses where I could access the appliance’s Web-based administration tools.