CentOS 7 Generic Cloud login

Mnn, you're not really confusing things, or at least you're not more confused than many other people are about "cloud computing". Cloud computing (CC) has become one of those trend-words, fashionable words that get used in lots of different circumstances.

To me, cloud computing just implies a service somewhere between Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service. (Themselves also 2 very abused words with many different interpretations.)

For me, auto-scaling with demand is not a required part of cloud computing. If you look at it, neither Amazon AWS nor Windows Azure had auto-scaling as part of their initial offering. Only Google AppEngine had this, and initially at the expense of other severe limitations on the run-time environment.

Clearly auto-scaling is desirable, and AWS has had it for some time through Rightscale and other 3rd party providers. But it's not the only differentiator between plain VPS and Cloud Computing.

Some of the key differentiators between VPS and Cloud Computing for me are:

• Management interface that is optimized for a fleet of VPS's and not just 1-5 VPS's.
• Presence of load balancing services and similar network-level services.
• A business model that prices storage, compute and bandwith differently, and allows a great deal of flexibility in the consumption of these.
• Sheer size. To me, if you can provision 10-100 virtual machines with short warning, then you're a VPS provider. If you can provision 100 - 10.000 VPS servers with short warning, then you're a cloud computing provider.

Turning off password checking on your EC2 boxes could mean that anyone can login and use them. That can be a problem. For instance, someone could run up a bill on your account.

Also, I don't know why you would want to run 100 instances all running firefox. If you want to automate the collection of web pages, consider looking at wget.

Firefox through X to/from a remote desktop is usually unacceptably slow.

I'm not using NX but you've made me curious about it if you think it is fast enough to support this sort of thing.

There is a way to do this sort of thing without NX; namely, with an X client (like a local ubuntu installation) and ssh with Xwindows forwarding. Perhaps this is similar enough that you can modify it for your needs.

The password requirement can be eliminated through the use of ssh public key authentication instead of turning off passwords on your ec2 boxes.

The ssh command to use is

   ssh -C -Y remoteid@remotehost.com firefox

or just

   ssh -C -Y remoteid@remotehost.com

and then execute whatever command you like from the remote shell.

Explanation:
-Y forward Xwindows from the remote host to the local host in trusting mode
-C compress Xwindows traffic

No Passwords: to do this without passwords in ssh run ssh-keygen, and generate a key pair you keep the private key in your .ssh/id_rsa and you copy the public key to the remote computer and paste it into .ssh/authorized_keys

If you decide you want a password after all, you can add a passphrase to your key if you like, but you only have to do that on the local computer, not the remotes. Or, you can delete the key out of .ssh/authorized_keys and ssh will use password checking instead of key checking when you log in.