Not my review, just linking to this article on Techtarget's new Cloud Computing site. The article has an interview with David Malan a Computer Science lecturer from Harvard making some fairly "kicking in open doors" kind of remarks. Amazon's AWS in the 'oldest' game in town and as a result has evolved substantially.
A comparison is made with Microsoft's Azure and Google's App Engine which in my humble opinion is comparing apples and oranges. As it stands, Amazon's service is more an Infrastructure as a Service, where is Microsoft and Google's respective offerings are more Platforms as a Service. They provide environment in which you can start coding immediately and not have to deal with the mechanics of individual server instances that have to be prep'ed with the dev platform of your choosing (the Amazon approach). Yes, you don't have to start completely from scratch, you can build on someone else's image, if it would suite your way of work...
Also the article, as far as I've been able to establish, contains an inaccuracy. It states that you can choose machine images with Windows 2008 Server, however there are currently no Windows 2008 images available on Amazon.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Monday, June 08, 2009
Amazon S3 Cloud Storage on Leopard 10.5.7; a European War Tale
A little while ago I've subscribed to Amazons S3 cloud storage service. Up to now I've been using it sparingly and the main interface to it has been S3Fox, a Firefox extension. This has actually worked reasonably well, even though its not necessarily the most intuitive interface, its still fairly easy to understand (for those that have been around long enough, think Norton Commander style). One of the great advantages for me has been that through virtue of the fact that Firefox is multi-platform, so is access to S3 through S3Fox. An important fact for me, since I use Linux, Mac OS X and Windows interchangeably.
Today I decided I wanted a better, more intuitive way to interact with S3 starting with my Mac (which I use most often). There were a number of items needed:
1. MacFUSE; a Filesystem User Space Environment
2. S3FS from Google Code, which needs to be compiled.
The whole process is all described here, so I won't repeat that.
Once you have installed MacFUSE and compiled the s3fs program, you are ready to mount your own S3 bucket and start filling it up with either backups (rsync'ing it for instance) or just as an extra HD. You could even mount multiple buckets.
The picture below shows what it looks like.
One point of note; I was unsuccessful trying to mount buckets located in Europe. It gave me a 301 error and it is unclear why. I saw a discussion in the Amazon AWS dev forum, but there was no answer from Amazon even...
So for now, use only US buckets and this should work.
UPDATE:
It turns out it doesn't work... Eventhough the S3 bucket gets loaded, it doesn't accept any files, nor can we create directories. So far I've been unable to determine the cause of this problem. It seems that there is a paid version of S3fs but the pricing ($129) seems disproportionate to its utility... the forums for s3fs also seem void of clear guidance on what the problem could be. So far I've been able to determine that there is an issue with requests to Amazon S3 that this program generates. What I don't understand is that not more people have complained about this so I'm guessing that there may be a version issue with underlying libraries being used by S3fs that only I (and 2 others seem to be experiencing)...
Today I decided I wanted a better, more intuitive way to interact with S3 starting with my Mac (which I use most often). There were a number of items needed:
1. MacFUSE; a Filesystem User Space Environment
2. S3FS from Google Code, which needs to be compiled.
The whole process is all described here, so I won't repeat that.
Once you have installed MacFUSE and compiled the s3fs program, you are ready to mount your own S3 bucket and start filling it up with either backups (rsync'ing it for instance) or just as an extra HD. You could even mount multiple buckets.
The picture below shows what it looks like.
One point of note; I was unsuccessful trying to mount buckets located in Europe. It gave me a 301 error and it is unclear why. I saw a discussion in the Amazon AWS dev forum, but there was no answer from Amazon even...
So for now, use only US buckets and this should work.
UPDATE:
It turns out it doesn't work... Eventhough the S3 bucket gets loaded, it doesn't accept any files, nor can we create directories. So far I've been unable to determine the cause of this problem. It seems that there is a paid version of S3fs but the pricing ($129) seems disproportionate to its utility... the forums for s3fs also seem void of clear guidance on what the problem could be. So far I've been able to determine that there is an issue with requests to Amazon S3 that this program generates. What I don't understand is that not more people have complained about this so I'm guessing that there may be a version issue with underlying libraries being used by S3fs that only I (and 2 others seem to be experiencing)...
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