AWS News Blog
Inbox Catchup
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My inbox is overflowing with great things that deserve blog posts of their very own, but since they come in so fast I am going to summarize them in this catchup post. Here’s what I’ve seen recently:
- Dmitriy Samovskiy wrote about Building a Multisourced Infrastructure Using OpenVPN in the most recent issue of Linux Journal. In this article he shows how to use OpenVPN to create virtual private links between multiple systems (some of which might be running on Amazon EC2), creating the appearance that all systems are on the same local area network even though they might be distributed between multiple data centers and service providers. Update: The High Scalability blog has a very informative interview with Dmitriy.
- Jeff Fedor and Terry Goertz wrote about Scaling With Clouds in the first of what they promise will be a three-part series of blog posts. Jeff and Terry review the concept of cloud computing and how each of Amazon’s services are relevant. They plan to cover designing, hosting, and managing scalable applications on AWS. Stay tuned to the Red Canary blog for more.
- While digging through my “Blog Pending” folder, I found an older note from Jeff with info about their customized version of ElasticFox. They used Mozilla’s XULRunner to create a standalone desktop version of ElasticFox.
- Jon Chase wrote to tell me about Send Along. He told me that he uses a hybrid hosting model. His site runs on a traditional web host, and he uses Amazon EC2 instances to handle the unpredictable load of brought on by file upload traffic (which he says happens on Monday mornings and after his sales promotions). The uploaded files are stored in Amazon S3. Jon wrapped up by telling me that the combination of S3 and EC2 has allowed him to build a fast and fault-tolerant site in a very small amount of time with almost no up-front costs.
- AWS Evangelist Mike Culver recently delivered an online presentation to the Online ColdFusion Meetup Group . His talk was recorded and you can see it here.
- The AnyTerm project caught my eye recently. Using AnyTerm you can embed an SSH window in a web page. If you do this, you can sit in your favorite coffee shop and run your EC2-powered business without having to worry about open ports. In fact, you can travel light and use browser-based access at your favorite net cafe. This might be useful if you are planning to build a Google of One.
- S3-powered Approver.com was upgraded earlier this year with some new features and a larger upper limit on upload sizes. Users with paid accounts can now uploads files up to 50 MB in length.
- Tim Reha of Venture All Stars came to Amazon HQ for a video interview with me last month and I think it went pretty well. You can watch it here.
- Robert Scoble followed in Tim’s footsteps and also interviewed me. You can watch that one here and read the back-story here.
- Not so recently, but still worth a mention, our developer support team has collected and published a set of Frequently Asked Questions for Amazon S3.
- Vamosalshopping supports browsing and shopping from five different Amazon retail sites in any of 6 different languages. It translates everything, from titles, to product descriptions, to customer reviews. There’s also a step-by-step guide to the Amazon checkout pipeline to simplify shopping on sites which use languages that you don’t know.
That’s all I have room for today! You may also want to follow the AWS Buzz on Del.icio.us for more information on what’s happening in the Amazon Web Services developer community.
— Jeff;