Amazon Web Services and FileMaker (Part 1)

Part one of an in-depth look at setting up an Amazon Web Server and installing FileMaker services by Duncan Baker of Sound Essentials:

Learn to set up your own FileMaker Server using Amazon Web Services in this step-by-step tutorial from Sounds Essential…

What’s involved in setting up FileMaker Server on Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the biggest players out there and reported to be among the most reliable. They now provide streaming services for Netflix and a whole list of other big name clients. If it’s good enough for all of them, it’s good enough for us right? So, let’s see what steps are involved in setting up our own Instance (AWS’ term for a virtual server).

First up, AWS provide a Free Tier service, whereby setting up and using your virtual server in the cloud is free for 12 months as long as you stay within certain limits of usage etc. Find out more about the terms of this offer here.

Although the Free Tier uses the bottom end of AWS’ hardware specs, we’ll be taking advantage of this offer just to check out what the service is like and if it might be a good match for us or any of our clients. If you’re willing to pay the price, you can get blazingly fast servers but all that can be explored later – the setup process is pretty much the same.

Part 1 walks you through setting up the AWS instance (what Amazon calls a server).  All instances are virtual, meaning the server’s processors, hard drive space, and memory are carved out of much larger banks of servers.  And that’s a good thing in many ways:  If you need more processors, memory, or hard drives, it’s just a setting change.  Or perhaps you’ll need redundancy, high speed fail over, or just extra processing power for high load times.  AWS handles all of that, and their interface has improved greatly since the last time I used it a couple of years ago.

Well written and easy to understand, this series is a must read if you want to use Amazon Web Services and FileMaker Server.

Amazon Web Services and FileMaker (Part 1)

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