Archive for the ‘Amazon’ Category

Music on Amazon S3

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

I just backed up the 5.5gig of my music collection to my Amazon S3 account using S3Fox Organiser. It was largely a painless process except for any song that had a # character in its name. Not sure why S3 won’t accept that but a simple rename sorted it.

I especially liked how the transfers are atomic. If for some reason a file failed half-way then it wouldn’t leave a half-uploaded file on S3. This made transfering 5.5gig painless with no worrying about what was and wasn’t uploaded properly.

Total cost? The initial 5.5gig transfer will cost me about one buck ten cents. From there on it will cost just under a dollar per month. Fantastic!

Posted in AAA, Amazon, Amazon S3, Music, S3, backup, files, simple storage service, transfer | Comments

Xen and Amazon EC2

Saturday, August 26th, 2006

In this post by Jeff Barr of Amazon, Xen is mentioned as the platform on which Amazon’s Elastic Computing is built. A good friend of mine works over at Xen and I am very impressed.

The rest of Jeff’s post is well worth reading. Playing field leveler indeed.

Posted in AAA, Amazon, Amazon EC2, Andrew Peace, Development, EC2, Friend, Glen Fleishman, Xen | Comments

Amazon EC2

Thursday, August 24th, 2006

If you thought Amazon’s S3 or SQS was interesting then Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is going to blow you away.


Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.

Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.

The images mentioned are stored on S3 (penny drops.)

This is the link between S3 and SQS I’ve been waiting for (without really knowing it.)

If I have my sums right you could run one server doing 1gigabyte an hour for 365 days for only $2,628. AFAIK that is incredibly cheap (for the bandwidth being used.)

I’ve got my beta account and am going to get into EC2.

Posted in AAA, Amazon, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2, S3, computing, grid, virtualisation, webservices | Comments

S3Fox

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

S3Fox

S3Fox is an extension for Firefox that gives you an FTP like view of your Amazon S3 account. You can upload and download files, view their URLs, create “directories” (S3 doesn’t technically support directories within buckets and so this has to be faked) and set the Access Control List on items.

Posted in AAA, Amazon, Amazon S3, Application, Extension, Firefox, S3, S3Fox, Software, Storage | Comments

Utilities != auto_scale

Saturday, July 22nd, 2006

In Amazon’s Data Socket Nicholas Carr writes on how Amazon’s S3 provides reliable, scalable storage to start-ups, lowering costs and barriers to entry. Om Malik is quoted as saying that the value of developers in these start-ups will move from the architectural side to user experience and “developer skillset.”

Now while I like S3 and think it will enable start-ups I must say you can still build an unscalable, unreliable service on it. S3 and co. don’t give you magic scalability, your application still has to be architected and developed with care and thought.

Posted in Amazon, Development, Nicholas Carr, Om Malik, apps, architecture, scalable, utilities | Comments

Amazon queue it up

Friday, July 14th, 2006

Amazon have released their Simple Queue Service, SQS, to the world. Technically it is exactly what the name suggests; a simple queuing service. Like S3 it does one thing and it does it well. Like S3 pricing is on usage, 10 cents for every thousand messages and 20 cents for every gig of data transfered.

Effectively though it is a lot more than that. Tie SQS up with S3 and some simple Rails code and you have a massively scalable, reliable application.

They also provide a Windows Communication Framework “add-in” which should make it really interesting for Windows developers.

I am really liking what Amazon are doing here, taking the core technologies found on servers that power applications, making them globally available and providing the kind of power smaller developments didn’t have access to.

(Thanks to Paul Fallon for the news.)

Posted in Amazon, Development, S3, SQS, Simple Queue Service, service | Comments

Comment Turk

Monday, July 3rd, 2006

Having recently been hit by spam bots on this site and finding the automated solutions to be ineffective it struck me that a Comment Turk is in order. This would be a system that makes use of human comment moderation, farming it out through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Plugins could easily be built for WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger et al which submit suspicious comments to a queue on Mechanical Turk. People can then come along and approve or reject the comment, being paid a cent per moderation. With the reputation system on Mechanical Turk you could largely get around spammers gaming Comment Turk.

Posted in Amazon, Automated, Blogs, Comment Turk, Comments, Distributed, Mechanical Turk, Spam | Comments