A while ago I was asked by my CIO, if we can replace our existing custom built intranet with something better that is available off the shelf.
I initially thought of showing off Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress and give a comparison along with the recommended platform. I thought of setting up the infrastructure on one of the test machines that I had which was running linux. Unfortunately it did not have apache, php and other required packages. Installation of these packages using apt-get was a challenge due to restrictive information security policies that would not allow download of files from the repositories. Also the organizational proxy did not play well with linux making it a nightmare to get anything done (CNTLM did work for a while). Overcoming these would have been a bureaucratic ordeal.
After some thought I decided to use AWS. Picked up a pre-built bitnami AMI from AWS marketplace and set it up on a spot EC2 micro instance.
It took a couple of days for one of our guys to put the content from our existing intranet on wordpress and find a good looking theme.
The demo to CIO went very well and we got the implementation green signal for Wordpress.
Since AWS EC2 instance was running on my personal account I got a bill of 3.82 USD later on for this exercise. A small price to pay for a successful demo with little effort and avoid organizational bureaucracy.
I have started loving the power of cloud and AWS.
I initially thought of showing off Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress and give a comparison along with the recommended platform. I thought of setting up the infrastructure on one of the test machines that I had which was running linux. Unfortunately it did not have apache, php and other required packages. Installation of these packages using apt-get was a challenge due to restrictive information security policies that would not allow download of files from the repositories. Also the organizational proxy did not play well with linux making it a nightmare to get anything done (CNTLM did work for a while). Overcoming these would have been a bureaucratic ordeal.
After some thought I decided to use AWS. Picked up a pre-built bitnami AMI from AWS marketplace and set it up on a spot EC2 micro instance.
It took a couple of days for one of our guys to put the content from our existing intranet on wordpress and find a good looking theme.
The demo to CIO went very well and we got the implementation green signal for Wordpress.
Since AWS EC2 instance was running on my personal account I got a bill of 3.82 USD later on for this exercise. A small price to pay for a successful demo with little effort and avoid organizational bureaucracy.
I have started loving the power of cloud and AWS.
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