The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud allows you to boot up a bunch of virtual servers on the cheap. You can configure a server just how you want it, and then save the 'image' of that instance over at Amazon, allowing you to boot up an image configured just the way you want it.
A server preconfigured with a base GIS stack of software is a great testing environment. It only takes a minute to boot up and instance, and then you can fool around for 10c/hour. Given how useful this can be, I've created a basic GIS instance, which is publicly available. It's based on the Ubuntu Januty image by Eric Hammond, and installed software includes:
- Mapserver (5.6.0 beta 2)
- Proj (4.7)
- PostGIS (1.3.6 rc1)
- GDAL/OGR (1.6.2)
- GEOS (3.1)
- Apache 2 prefork
- GeoDjango (SVN)
The base software installation followed the same instructions as outlined in the UbuntuBaseStack example, and a few additional items have been added to get you going quickly, including a demo page with links to various examples that run live from the ec2 instance.
To get going with this, you'll need an Amazon Web Services account for EC2, and you'll need to follow their detailed Getting Started instructions. Getting it all set up should take about 20 minutes, and thereafter it's just a quick command to start a new instance.
When it comes time to boot up a new image, use ami-0ceb0865 (created Oct 2009) as the instance ID. After a minute, run ec2-describe-instances to get the url for the instance. It should be web accessible from the start, and of course you can now ssh into it to start hacking (log in with 'root' and no password).
