Used to setup OpenVPN servers for companies and pals, usually on real hard metal servers somewhere racked up , VPS or in DIY PCs running with bare 128MB memory. And especially that DD-WRT Linksys router I had a while ago before leaving for Penang.
Just managed to call up a $0.03/hr EC2 instance running FC4 (that’s old!) and then set it up automatically with OpenVPN 2.0.x somewhere in ‘east US’ (less than 10mins in total). Can’t beat this price and flexibility of having a VPN-on-demand-in-the-cloud, controlled just by a single script and a bunch of key pairs. There’s no need to fill up forms, make arrangement with the NOC to gain physical access etc.
The interesting thing is that it’s like a disposable VPN server somewhere up there. Even if I am just using it to test and develop some scripts (just simple Bash), I don’t have to worry about having to commit to a VPS (by month) or hosted server. The EC2 instance is real, production IP and is a complete OS. Unlike a virtual machine running on personal hypervisor e.g. VMware Server or KVM etc. And not to mention I don’t have public IPs to test.
So if there’s no confidential data (could convert them to dummy or ensure they are classified and handled appropriately), cloud instances could be leveraged to do that once per month or ad-hoc patch/test/develop. There’s no initial capital expenditure to worry about e.g setup cost, per month commitment, real estate, hardware etc.
Am tagging a bookmark at Sprayfly in case of any news. That’s why I got the kick-off of learning how to manage instances on EC2.
Here’s my dirty script if anyone’s interested to invoke your own OpenVPN server in Amazon EC2.
http://jez4christ.com/view/files/autoproxy-with-vpn.tar.gz courtesy of Sprayfly, thanks!