Posts tagged ‘cloud computing’
Amazon adds persistent storage to EC2 »
Amazon is adding persistent storage as an option to EC2 — currently it’s in private beta.
Previously, disk storage on an EC2 was transient:- when the machine was shut down or crashed, it felt like a hard drive crash. (And you’d lose your IP address too, but Amazon added static IPs a little while ago too.) The path to reliability was to use S3, but that can’t be mounted as a native file system.
The persistent storage appears as a raw, mountable filesystem that needs to be formatted. You’ll be able to make a quick snapshot of the data, for backup. No word on pricing or its performance, but you’d expect it to be aligned with S3.
There’s been the option of mounting S3 in EC2 using davfs, which mounts with WebDAV, but that’s a bit of a hack and one wonders what the performance would be like.
Google App Engine »
Google announces Google App Engine, a complete web app hosting environment on the Google platform. Currently in a limited beta, with Python as the programming language
Google App Engine makes it easy to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The environment includes the following features:
- dynamic web serving, with full support for common web technologies
- persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
- automatic scaling and load balancing
- APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
- a fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your compute
The main demo that Google have made for it, HuddleChat, is a direct, “feature for feature, layout for layout”, clone of 37signal’s Campfire, a great web chat application made by a company of 10. “We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for.”
Update: Google have taken down HuddleChat, citing widespread complaints.
Scalr: auto-scaling web app hosting in EC2 »
Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon’s EC2.
It allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI’s for load balancers (pound or nginx), app servers (apache, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.
The project is still very young, but we’re hoping that by open sourcing it the AWS development community can turn this into a robust hosting platform and give users an alternative to the current fee based services available.
This looks like it could be great when it develops. I kind of think that Amazon themselves should be providing this kind of executive service to auto-scale and -heal an application deployed in their grid (and wouldn’t be surprised if they add it as their service matures).
“We” being Intridea, a web dev shop
Amazon adds static IP addresses to EC2 »
This is great news: Amazon EC2 now lets you reserve static IP addresses, and allocate them to your instances. Previously, IP addresses were dynamic — if you shutdown an instance, or it crashed, the IP that it had was lost: it would go back into the general allocation pool.
This makes EC2 much more viable for running public web sites, because now you can set up a load balancer on a static IP, and not have to worry about dynamic DNS, and clients that ignore TTLs.