Success: getting an Amazon EC2 instance up with your software running on it. Able to take a screen capture to show work actually complete before shutting down the instance to avoid running up unnecessary charge.

Despair: testing stop / restart and then realizing that your public DNS has changed, which means your site can’t be bookmarked, its certs no longer work, and you have to update a properties file with a new host name.

Hope: the box itself still has your stuff on it, you can log in with the same keys, and there’s this thing called an Elastic IP available for a charge from Amazon.

Elation: stop / restart works! New user ids granted through IAM, console renamed to give something useful, PEM sent out for access, and JIRA ticket marked as resolved.

Contentment: Now time for bed, in time to wake up and think of the other three things you wanted to accomplish in the evening with Fringe playing in the background courtesy of NetFlix.