ec2-consistent-snapshot is a tool that uses the Amazon EC2 API to initiate a snapshot of an EBS volume with some additional work to help ensure that an XFS file system and/or MySQL database are in a consistent state on that snapshot.
Ahmed Kamal pointed out to me yesterday that we can save lots of trouble installing ec2-consistent-snapshot by adding a dependency on the new libnet-amazon-ec2-perl package in Ubuntu instead of forcing people to install the Net::Amazon::EC2 Perl package through CPAN (not easy for the uninitiated).
I released a new version of ec2-consistent-snapshot which has this new dependency and updated documentation. Installing this software on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid, 10.10 Maverick, and the upcoming Natty release is now as easy as:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alestic && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ec2-consistent-snapshot
Once it is installed, you can read the documentation with the command
man ec2-consistent-snapshot
Screencast
Ahmed also just released a screencast which includes a quick demo of using ec2-consistent-snapshot:
This screencast walks through the steps I outlined in this article on the AWS site:
Though that paper is old in cloud years, it is still pretty much how I and many others run MySQL on EC2.