Amazon Web Services
Amazon is to blame for my recent lack of posts. I ran across a story about Amazon Web Services a week or two, and since then most of my non-work tiime has been spent playing around with them. There are two services that really interest me:
1. Simple Storage Service (also known at S3). Basically it is a fault tolerant 99.999% available online storage system. They sell a gig of storage for $.15/month. Yeah you read that right. You also have to pay for transfer at $.20 per month. I looked at the price of a 150GB IDE hard drive online and it was $.13 per gig if you divided the cost of the drive across a year. Then the thing will probably fail at some point.
2. Elastic Computing Cloud. This is a virtual serving environment where you get a virtualized linux environment running equal to 1.7Ghz Xeon with over a GB of ram. This is $.10 per hour of runtime and $.20 per GB of transfer. So if you ran it for a month it would cost $72 plus bandwith used. Oh…and it comes with a 250MB/s pipe to the Internet.
Now all of these services are definately for the tech minded. The S3 service for instance in a set of http based API’s for managing files. So you need to be a programmer type to use it. Although there are some apps that have been written to allow you to use it as a disk drive from your PC. I haven’t gotten to the Computing Cloud yet to see what you need to get up and running.
So most of my time has been consumed writing a program to interface with with S3. You might be asking why? Well my first program is just to get the hang of the API and develop some common classes I can use in the real program I am writing. I’m keeping that under wraps for now until I figure it all out, but it is a really cool concept, something I have wanted personally for year. It seems technology is finally starting to make it a reality.