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 Canonical Ubuntu Karmic (32bit) image, it boots up off an EBS block (note the extra EBS charge as outlined in the AWS documentation). Installed software includes:
- Mapserver (5.6.0)
- Proj (4.7)
- PostGIS (1.5)
- GDAL/OGR (1.7.1)
- GEOS (3.2)
- Apache 2 prefork
- GeoDjango (SVN, linked to from python2.6)
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 go to the AWS Console website. Be sure you've set up a keypair and a security zone that includes opening up port 80 and 22 (and any others you might want). Then just choose to launch a new instance, and use ami-9b2fc3f2 (created February 2010) as the instance ID. Now ssh into it with the keypair you launched it with to start hacking (ssh in with 'ubuntu@' instead of 'root@').
