Greg;
I've asked some questions about sharing an instance but it doesn't seem to be working the way I'm expecting (Unfortunately I'm also new to Amazon EC2/S3 so that may be part of my difficulty). I'm thinking maybe if I can explain what I'm trying to do, you guys could tell me the best way to do it:
All of this will work fine the way you expect. It sounds like you might have to dig into the S3 buckets a bit more to get a sense of where everything is.
I created an instance of CloudMan, I chose the data cluster option on the first dialog. Then I ssh'd in and installed stuff on /mnt/galaxyData Then I clicked the share icon on the cloudman front page.
To answer your question from the other thread, you can see the share string for any instances you've created by clicking on the share icon again. It will show you available shared clusters.
(But when I look in S3 I don't think I'm seeing the programs I installed, and I'm not sure how my /mnt/galaxyData volume can be shared with the sharestring.)
All of the high level data for a shared instance will be in S3 folders in: cm-aBigLongUniqueName/Shared/date--time (which is also the share string) You are right that the volume is not in S3. It is an EBS snapshot, which you can see in the EC2 console under the 'Snapshots' link. The description will start with 'CloudMan share-a-cluster.' In the S3 bucket, the file persistent_data.yaml has the snapshot ID and uses this to restart the exact cluster later with your updated volume. In terms of costs, the S3 costs will be minimal since they are small files but the EBS snapshot does cost $.10/Gb/month. Hope this helps, Brad