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The Ubuntu and Debian EC2 images published on http://alestic.com allow you to send in a startup script using the EC2 user-data parameter when you run a new instance. This functionality is useful for automating the installation and configuration of software on EC2 instances.

The research by the information visualization community shows clearly that using a visual representation of data-sets enables faster analysis by the end users. Tulip, created by David AUBER, is a contribution of the area of information visualization, “ InfoViz ”. Even if the Tulip framework allows the visualization, the drawing and the edition of small graphs, all the parts of the framework have been built in order to be able to visualize graphs having more than 1.000.000 elements. Such a visualization system must draw and display huge graphs, allows the navigation through geometric operations as well as the extraction of subgraphs and the enhancement of the results obtained by filtering.

Many Ubuntu and Debian images for Amazon EC2 include a hook where scripts passed as user-data will be run as root on the first boot.

At Campus Explorer, we’ve been experimenting with an approach where the actual user-data is a very short script which downloads and runs other scripts. This idea is not new, but I have simplified the process by creating a small tool named runurl which adds a lot of flexibility and convenience when configuring new servers.