It is time for one of my inbox-clearing blog posts once again. Here’s a bunch of cool stuff that you might like:
- Benjamin Kudria just wrapped up an internship at the New York Times. He wrote a detailed recap of his experience and noted that he had the opportunity to use Amazon EC2 and S3. As he notes, "had never worked with AWS before, and I was amazed at how easy it was to have my managers agree to offload a pretty significant part of our functionality to Amazon’s servers. I ended up learned a lot about S3
and EC2!" - rPath will be sponsoring a Cloud Computing Meetup in New York City next week at the Westin in Times Square. The meetup will take place after conclusion of the AWS Start-Up event at the same location.
- SubCloud is an enterprise file system implemented on top of Amazon S3 using FUSE. It has a rich feature list, lots of documentation, and is available for trial use via a time-limited license key. Files are stored directly into S3, which means that they can also be accessed using other S3 tools.
- There’s a new release of Bucket Explorer, with support for copying, renaming, and moving files, local vs. remote file comparison, reporting, and much more. Version for Windows, Linux, and the Mac are available.
- Adam Kalsey of Workhabit wrote to tell me that they’ve used EC2 and EBS to create a fully managed, autoscaling Drupal hosting platform. You can read more in the blog post and you can learn even more about it here. The platform takes care of all of the dirty work. As they say:
We took everything we know about scaling Drupal and built it into a
turn-key cluster called Elastic2 that’s pre-tuned to run Drupal. Simply
place your Drupal app on the cluster and you’ll be able to run and
scale your site. We continually monitor your servers and traffic and
automatically add capacity to the cluster as needed.You can also watch Adam discuss his new pride and joy.
- Next week, folks from BioTeam, Univa UD and AWS will jointly deliver a live webinar: "Cloud and Clusters: Running UniCluster in Amazon's EC2." The webinar is free but you'd better sign up ahead of time. They’ll provide an overview of HPC (High Performance Computing) using EC2, who’s doing it and how.
- My friend Adam Rifkin sent me a link to a really interesting blog post by Andy Baio. Andy used the Amazon Mechanical Turk to uncover release dates for a list of hundreds of sound clips used inside of a music mashup. He was very happy with the quality and speed of the work — "Within an hour, all but 4 answers were submitted. The median time to finish a request was an impressive 26 seconds." I've also tagged a couple of other good Mechanical Turk success stories on Delicous.
- Damien Tanner wrote to tell me that New Bamboo has released Panda, an open source solution for video uploading, encoding, and streaming. Running entirely within the AWS cloud, Panda makes use of EC2, S3, and SimpleDB. Panda is available as an EC2 AMI (Amazon Machine Image) for easy launching. There’s also a complete getting started guide. Once running, Panda is accessed using a REST API.
- Since I just mentioned SimpleDB, I should also note that we have a job opening for a Business Development Manager for SimpleDB. Details are in the job description — you’ll need 5-7 years of relevant experience, a technical degree, and great communication skills. If you click the link and land on a different job, go here and search for "SimpleDB."
Ok, I think that about does it for tonight. If you’ve built something interesting using an Amazon Web Service, drop me a line and I’ll do my best to mention it here.
— Jeff;
