cloud – The Iterate Blog

Can 6 tech students help a telecom giant innovate in 6 weeks? Telenor Norway wants to solve real problems for real people. As summer interns in Iterate – the lean startup consultancy in Norway – we’ve been hired to build, measure and learn how to unleash the power of future telco technology. Every week we blog about what we’ve learned.

Here’s week 3.

We knew from the beginning this internship was going to be different.

Most tech student summer internships follow a standard format: You show up the first day to a round of introductions, you get assigned a workstation, a task, and maybe some company swag. The first week is focused on workshops and courses, and then you are set to work. For the next few weeks you work on your project in order to bring it to completion on time.

Certainly a cool internship when you get to brew your own beer and design a matching label.

While waiting for a new project, I wanted to learn something useful. And because on many projects we need to assess and test the performance of the application being developed while only rarely there is enough hardware for generating a realistic load, I decided to learn more about provisioning virtual machines on demand in the Cloud, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS). I’ve learned a lot about the tools available to work with AWS and the automation of the setup of resources (machine instances, security groups, databases etc.) and automatic customization of virtual machine instances in the AWS cloud. I’d like to present a brief introduction into AWS and a succinct overview of the tools and automation options. If you are familiar with AWS/EC2 then you might want to jump over the introduction directly to the automation section.