I’ve been seeing more AWS topics in here lately, so I figured I’d share a Packer AMI that I built that helped greatly speed up my relay/producer iteration time.
I made it because my initial attempts were painfully slow, having to download and compile sources anytime I borked up an EC2 instance beyond repair. You build the image yourself, in your AWS account, and the AMI is solely owned by you after that. We use a huge EC2 instance so the entire build only takes about an hour, and costs you less than $1. The node is totally uninitialized in terms of starting Cardano, but Operators Guild and the cardano cli tools are present on the box. Only the standard node startup tasks are required to get a relay or block-producer online.
The repo has a HashiCorp packer definition in it that will spin up an EC2 instance, install all the typical Cardano things, and convert it in to an AMI that can be quickly redeployed over and over again. Usage assumes you are already familiar with Packer, launching EC2 instances, and setting up security groups.