In this document the PublicDNS is ec2-54-234-249-162.compute-1.amazonaws.com. See the Things You'll Need to Know to find PublicDNS for your instance.

The Pre-installed PostgreSQL Database

The information you need to access the billing data in the service's PostgresSQL database is shown below. The database has one user account with read access to the data. You will use this user name and password when accessing the content of the Cloud Billing Database.

host
PublicDNS
database name
billing
username
billing_viewer
password
billing_viewer_password

The instance depends on its EC2 Security Group to enforce database security. We do not want to burden the technical staff with the task of maintaining database users and password. We believe it is less burdensome to restrict access to the instance on which the database resides.

If you need access to the database contact your appropriate AWS administrator. The administrator will add your client IP address to the appropriate EC2 Security Group.

The PostgreSQL documentation is available at: http://www.postgresql.org

The Pre-installed Service

The service performs two functions. The first is to load the data from the Amazon S3 billing files into the PostgreSQL database. The seconds is to communicate with the outside world. For example the most important information you need to communicate to the server is the location of the S3 bucket that contain the billing files.

You can interact directly with the service using any web browser. All you need is enter the http://PublicDNS/rest/v1/ into the browsers destination URL window.

The Sample Web Application

This web application interact indirectly with the pre-installed service. It provides a more familiar user experience. Its most important feature is that it provides an interactive query tool. This tool presents the database content in a more user friendly fashion than does the service itself.

The easiest way to access this application is to connect to the Cloud Billing Service home page. Start a web browser. Enter http://PublicDNS into the browsers destination URL window.

The web server will automatically re-direct you to the Dowd and Associates Cloud Billing web page. Note that the re-direction adds the address of the PublicDNS in the query string.

This web application demonstrates how to interact with the pre-installed service. Use it as is or as the starting point of your own reporting web site.

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