Get Started with Amazon EC2, Run Your .NET MVC3 (Razor) Site in the Cloud with Linux Mono

I’ve recently been getting pretty excited about Amazon EC2 once I realized you can setup a micro linux server for free to learn and test out their services. I know, a couple years behind the curve right? I’ve just never really looked into it. Now that I’m familiarizing myself with the whole cloud concept with Amazon, it’s really cool to think of small business growth potential in the web market without the restraint of building a heavy infrastructure upfront. I realize after reading some other articles that in the long run, it is probably more expensive than hosting your own solution. But as a startup, it still seems to me that it’s a pretty good deal at least for short term events or just taking their infrastructure out for a spin to test some ideas. Pay for what you use; that’s Amazon’s big pitch with their Amazon Web Services (AWS).

So if you want to play around with AWS for free, you have to roll Linux. If you want to host ASP.NET MVC3 on AWS Linux, there’s a few steps you need to take. For this post, I’ll talk about some of the AWS services that can get you started along with how to install and configure your environment for hosting ASP.NET MVC3 applications with Linux and Mono.

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Multiple Web Servers over a Single IP, Using Apache as a Reverse Proxy

As a developer, I don’t get to play with the IT side of things quite as much as I would like to.  So I enjoy the little things, like learning how to use a reverse proxy on Apache.  At home, I only have one IP coming in with my regular Internet connection, and I want the ability to run multiple servers inside my network on port 80. In the past, I’ve always just setup a new port and routed it to whichever server I wanted. 8080 here, 8081 there, etc. Well with Apache reverse proxy (mod_proxy), I found it was very easy to setup route requests to other internal servers.

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Installing OpenSuse 11.2 with Mono 2.6.1 and Apache Using Text Mode Configuration – Porting to Mono Part 1 of 3

I’ve always kept an eye on the Mono project, mostly out of curiosity and intrigue. The last time I played around with Mono it was at version 2.0, and at the time I didn’t really spend a lot of time on it because it didn’t support some of the things I was using.  Well recently, I regained interest in Mono when I saw it now supports MVC and some of Dblinq. And since I’ve been buzzing on the whole MVC thing for awhile, I decided to check Mono out for myself and start a fun little porting project. So this is the first part of a three part series describing everything I did to get a server up and running and one of my Asp.Net MVC applications ported to Mono.

This first part will cover installing and configuring an OpenSuse 11.2 server with Apache/Mono and SSH. The second part will talk about how to setup a MySql Membership provider (with mono and Windows), and the third part is a walkthrough showing how to port a simple Asp.Net MVC site to mono and MySql. I’m also targeting those of you who use virtual hosting where you might only have SSH (after install) to configure your server, so I will be using text based tools: SSH, vi, and yast for all my installations and configuration after getting the base system installed.

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