Amazon announced persistent storage for EC2

If Google App Engine does not provide enough flexibility for you, then there is some good news from Amazon: one of the missing pieces, persistent storage for EC2, has just been announced.

Trying out Google App Engine

Yesterday night Google launched App Engine, a highly scalable web application platform, which has the potential to become a game changer. I was lucky to grab a developer account, which is currently tied to several limitations:

• only 10000 developer accounts available
• applications have to be coded in Python
• only three applications per developer
• bandwidth, storage and CPU usage limitations
• no road map, no info about future pricing model
  

On the other hand, it's free for now, you can use the Django open source web framework and template language, you can locally develop and test your app with the cross platform Google App Engine SDK (download size only 2.3 MB - on Mac OS X), you get a powerful administration interface at your Google account and most important, it is extremely easy to get started with, in no time you have a schema-less, database driven helloworld web application deployed on Google's server farm.

The internet users may start their own home business by having business deals with the global entrepreneurs. The different brands of computers have been manufacturing the latest and stylish models of different sizes and shapes for the computing clients. The main features of hosting plans of godaddy are reputable among the potential customers. You may get hosting services of high quality in affordable rates by joining powweb, reliable web host.

Amazon S3 will soon support upload via HTTP POST

One limitation of Amazon S3 is its strict REST behavior: upload only via HTTP PUT, and that is not possible with most of the browsers. Today a proposal was published by Amazon staff, so the final solution is probably not too far away anymore.

Amazon EC2 instances now with up to 15 GB RAM

Utility computing is getting more and more interesting for scalable webhosting. So far Amazon EC2 only had one instance type with 1.7 GB RAM, 160 GB HD, 32-bit platform and $0.10 per instance hour. Now there are two new Amazon EC2 instance type, both 64-bit platform and with significantly more power:

Large instance (new):
7.5 GB RAM, 850 GB HD, four times more computing performance, $0.40 per instance hour

Extra large instance (new):
15 GB RAM, 1690 GB HD, eight times more computing performance, $0.80 per instance hour

I am working right now on some Erlang tools to simplify web application hosting on utility computing infrastructure and look forward to get my hands dirty on this new EC2 instances !

Mount Amazon S3 on your Mac

I recently discovered s3fs, a fuse based file system which allows to mount an Amazon S3 bucket like a normal file system at your PC. With other words, it is very easy and relatively cheap now to expand your local hard drive with terabytes of backup or Photo/Video storage. And with the recently announced Amazon S3 SLA, it seems Amazon is committed to continue with this service.
s3fs is currently only provided in form of source code. But with a little bit of tweaking I got it compiling and running on my Mac, see below the instructions and the required Mac specific modifications:

Get and install the latest MacFUSE-Core. This is just background process, without any
GUI elements.

Checkout the s3fs source code. Because it is just one file, you can even copy it manually in a newly created directory and add the following line to s3fs.cpp
(after #define FUSE_USE_VERSION 26):

 #define __off_t off_t

Start a terminal, change to the directory with the s3fs.cpp file inside and prepare the environment:

  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

Next modify the Makefile (or create one, if you just downloaded the s3fs.cpp):

  all:
  g++ -Wall -D__FreeBSD__=10 -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 $(shell pkg-config fuse --cflags --libs) -lcurl -lcrypto $(shell xml2-config --cflags --libs) -ggdb s3fs.cpp -o s3fs
@echo ok!

  clean:
  rm -f s3fs s3fs.o

If everything went well, you should have now a binary file s3fs in that directory. Now create a file /etc/passwd-s3fs which contains just your Amazon ID and secret key separated by ":", e.g:

  example-id:example-secret-key

now you create a new Amazon S3 bucket. I have been using the S3 Browser for that. Define a mount point, I just created a new directory in my home folder for that. Now you can mount that directory to your newly created Amazon S3 Bucket by running the following command:

  ./s3fs your-bucket-name your-mount-point-directory

Now you should see the MacFUSE icon in the Mac OS X Finder. And any file you put into your mount point directory is now physically stored at your bucket at Amazon S3. It's not very user friendly yet, let's hope the MacFusion guys integrate it soon into their excellent Fuse tool. I plan to integrate this S3 bucket access via s3fs into my software development toolchain. Because everything is scripted there, s3fs works fine for me, even if lots of important features are still missing.

Update:

In case you don't have libxml2 installed already, you need to install it first:

  sudo port install libxml2