I was surprised (but pleased) to find that MicroStrategy is now available on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. For the past several months I had been watching the business intelligence offerings there but was seeing mostly Jaspersoft, Birt, and a handful of smaller players that I was not familiar with. Seeing MicroStrategy available, especially the the free reporting suite, means that kicking the tires, spinning out a new instance for a prospect demo, or simply trying out 9.3 in a temporary environment is cheap and easy to do. I also see MicroStrategy’s embrace of AWS, along with their very early support for Redshift, as signs that MicroStrategy is committed to the cloud architecture, and not just their cloud offering.
I took the MicroStrategy Suite on AWS for a test drive through my AWS account and had it up and running within 30 minutes. The one trick was realizing that I had to decrypt the key pair I generated so that I could log into the server from remote desktop. Once I had that in place I had no troubles getting to the machine, activating the server, and then connecting to it from my local 9.3 instance.
Unless I win the $550M PowerBall jackpot tonight I’ll probably terminate the server before the weekend. In most companies today, to set up a VM like this I would have had to request a ticket for a new VM, haggle with the VM admin over how much memory I was allowed (I like to have at minimum 8 GB for development, and 64 GB for production), and then have to download the MicroStrategy media, move it the machine, unpack it, install it, and then reboot. Using AWS I didn’t have to haggle with anyone, I opted for the $0.46 / hour and 7.75 GB RAM version, and instantiated the server. All the necessary ports were open (also a typical hassle) and I was up and running without any hiccups.
SQL Server 2008 comes pre-installed on the image, and the metadata and warehouse tables are all contained in SQL Server. Even though this was a preconfigured instance I had to run the cubes in order to get the Visual Insight reports to work in the Tutorial. I also tweaked the memory and report governing settings, but it’s understandable that none of these were pre-configured.
I haven’t tested the mobile piece yet, but the server was fully configured and I doubt that the setup will be different than the initial spinout. So…again, MicroStrategy goes off and does something, neglects to tout it, and through some luck I stumble upon something they’ve done that is developer / engineer friendly.
The licence code I got from Microstrategy does now work in AWS. I followed the steps correctly.
How did you get your licence code?
If the version in the Cloud is the same as your CD key (which you can get by requesting a free trial from the web site — up to 25 users) then you can activate it using what MicroStrategy provides. If you aren’t a current customer or partner you will need to go this route.