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Wednesday, May 06, 2009
(You can review my description of S3 here.) Because Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, S3, has been around for quite a while, the community has built a large number of libraries to access S3 programmatically. The C# space is pretty well crowded as well, and many folks wrote libraries that are good enough for their needs, then released those libraries to the world. The trick in picking an S3 library does not revolve around picking a best library. Instead, it involves finding one written by someone who had a similar set of needs. When looking for a library, think about how you want to add, update, and delete objects in S3. Write down the use cases. Then, download a set of libraries and keep messing with them until you find one that matches your needs. My planned usage involves: Create a bucket once, when the application first runs. (This step ...
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Utility Computing
F#
S3
Amazon Web Services
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Monday, May 04, 2009
This week, we close out our look at the Amazon Web Services implementation of the AppEngine Photo Application. S3 is perhaps one of the best known, most used services on AWS. Before we discuss using S3, I need to cover some basic terminology. The key words to know are bucket, object, and key. A bucket contains zero or more objects. An object is associated with one key. Buckets have names and are associated with an AWS account. Upon creating a bucket, you also create an addressable resource on the Internet. For example, I can create a bucket named MyS3Bucket. Upon creating that resource, S3 enables a new URI at http://MyS3Bucket.s3.amazonaws.com and at http://s3.amazonaws.com/MyS3Bucket. The bucket can be public or private. A public bucket can be accessed by anyone whereas a private bucket requires a token to access any contents. The owner of the bucket ...
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Utility Computing
S3
Amazon Web Services
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Monday, April 13, 2009
Back in February, I walked through the development of a Photo storage application. The application originally comes from one of the examples in the REST book Kenn Scribner and I wrote, Effective REST Services via .NET. Photo sharing and uploads allow for me to present a well understood application without providing a lot of background. For a photo, you upload it somewhere and store metadata about the photo itself. We already covered Google App Engine in February. For this application, we will use Amazon Web Services, including SimpleDB, Simple Storage Service, and Elastic Compute Cloud. At the end, I’ll tell you what I thought of the experience. I’ll develop the application in F#. When I presented this code to the Midwest Cloud Computing Users Group for the April 2009 meeting, Amanda Laucher offered up that my use of F# used some idioms she hadn’t seen before. That’s a ...
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EC2
Utility Computing
S3
Amazon Web Services
SimpleDB
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Friday, April 10, 2009
The Amazon Web Services Management Console is SIGNIFICANTLY easier to use than the command line applications one must use to manage an EC2 instance. I had puzzled out all the commands and got things working. Tonight, I stumbled across the AWS Management Console: https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/. It’s a nice, point and click interface to setup an Amazon Machine Instance (AMI), bundle that instance into a bucket, figure out connection credentials, setup common security groups, etc. The interface has the advantage of telling me exactly how far along the system has gone with each step. This was particularly nice when bundling my AMI. Without the feedback, I wouldn’t have known what was going on for the 20 or so minutes where the instance was paused and packaged. The service even handles storing the image in your S3 account. I also had to install IIS tonight. The console made it easy to create ...
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EC2
S3
Amazon Web Services
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009
I originally presented this talk to the Azure Cloud Computing User Group on February 25, 2009. Thanks to Bryce Calhoun for inviting me to present! The original meeting announcement had this summary: Scott Seely, Architect at MySpace, will kick off the meeting with a 20-30 minute overview of the top three cloud computing offerings available today: Google App Engine, Amazon EC3 and Azure Services. His discussion will be primarily focused on a compare/contrast of the functionality and features inherent to each platform. Enjoy!
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CloudFront
Azure
Google App Engine
EC2
Simple Storage Service
Cloud Computing
Utility Computing
Elastic Compute Cloud
Cloud Storage
SQS
S3
Simple Queue Service
Amazon Web Services
SimpleDB
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009
I'll be speaking Wednesday night at the Cloud Computing User Group in Downers Grove, IL. I have a short presentation on the main computing platforms. If you are a regular reader, you know that I've been spending some time going beneath the surface on major platforms. If folks like the high level overview, I'll do some more in depth talks in the future. Here are the details and the announcement that Bryce Calhoun sent out: Join us for the third local meeting of the Cloud Computing User Group – this month in Downers Grove. At this meeting, we will be learning about how Live ID integration works in the Azure cloud computing platform. We’ll demo and dig into the code of an application built in the cloud that integrates directly with the Live ID service and stores information specific to the individual associated with that ID. Also, Scott Seely, Architect ...
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Azure
Google App Engine
EC2
Simple Storage Service
Cloud Computing
Utility Computing
SQS
S3
Simple Queue Service
Amazon Web Services
SimpleDB
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Wednesday, February 04, 2009
I have found a need to do some research across the various cloud offerings so that I get good feel for what each has to offer. At this point in my investigations, I am focusing on only three platforms: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google App Engine. The three have common sets of features: storage through an API, compute resources, and ability to respond to demand by scaling application instances. The storage APIs encourage scalable patterns over patterns that could cause data contention. Amazon requires that the application handle scale up and down on its own. Azure and App Engine scale for the user through a combination of configuration and observed demand. These services also offer authentication services as well as the ability to create your own authentication. App Engine integrates with Google logins, Azure works with Windows Live, and Amazon through security mechanisms in the Amazon Machine Instances. ...
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CloudFront
Azure
Google App Engine
EC2
Simple Storage Service
Cloud Computing
Utility Computing
Elastic Compute Cloud
Cloud Storage
SQS
S3
Simple Queue Service
Amazon Web Services