rawsug.org

6PM-8PM in room 70-3000 on the RIT campus.

Learn how Amazon Web Services help provide scalability by putting your applications into the cloud.
Free Pizza and T-Shirts!
Chat with developers that use Amazon Web Services to host their entire business operations.
Meet the creators of the Python and Java AWS communication libraries.
For more information see our homepage at http://rawsug.org

More info to follow!

Our friends at CloudRight will once again be providing pizza and drinks for our October meeting. Show up hungry!

Our second meeting this fall will feature Dave Johnson from rPath who will discuss their EC2 management tools. In addition, time permitting Mitch Garnaat will give a short demo of a new video transcoding AMI.
The meeting will be take place on October 21st from 6 to 8pm. The meeting room is on the RIT campus in the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences building (70). Room 70-2400 is close to the main stairs, on the 2nd floor. Just walk towards the back of the building and we're the first left in that hallway. Plenty of parking is in J lot, in front of the building.

AMI Lifecycle Management for Amazon EC2

We will be kicking off our new season of RAWSUG meetings in style. Jinesh Varia, a technology evangelist from Amazon Web Services will be joining us for the evening with lots of great information about current AWS activity and some insight about what might be coming down the road. See Jin's abstract below for more info.

The meeting will be held on the RIT campus in room 70-2400 (the IT department's conference room) on 9/23 from 6PM until 8PM. Pizza will be provided by our sponsor, CloudRight. Don't miss out!

The attached map indicates the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences (building 70) where the meeting will be held. There is visitor parking in lot J.

Cloud Architectures – Amazon Web Services

Amazon has been privately testing a persistent storage feature for EC2 that is called EBS (or Elastic Block Store). Several developers like myself have been given the opportunity to kick the tires for the last few months. The details about what this service provides are found here (http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_c_1_3435361_1?ie=UTF8&node=689343011&n...), so I won't re-hash them in great detail. I'll just say that this service provides fairly fast attached storage for EC2 instances. A nice feature is snapshots, which get stored in Amazon S3. You can create a new volume from scratch, or base it on an existing snapshot. This comes in handy when you have a large dataset that you'd like to make available to your EC2 instance.

One question that I see a lot is "How do I get my file of type 'blah' to be served properly from S3?"
The answer, it turns out is fairly simple. Each object in S3 has metadata associated with it. When you upload the file, you can set that metadata, including the Content-Type header. For example, XML files use; Content-Type: text/xml
If you have something like an .swf file, you'd use;
Content-Type: application/x-shockwave-flash
or for a mp4 video file;
Content-Type: video/mp4

To do this using the Jets3t java client, you'd write some code that looks like this;

RestS3Service s3 = getS3Service();
S3Bucket bucket = new S3Bucket(bucketName);
S3Object obj = new S3Object(bucket, objectId);
obj.setContentType(mimeType);
obj.setContentLength(fileSize);
obj.setDataInputStream(iStr);

Not a lot on the details, but more of a business overview.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-05/mf_amazon

My article about migrating data from an RDBMS to Amazon SimpleDB was just published at the AWS Dev Central site.

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=129...

Have a look and let me know what you think.

David

Amazon.com is now going to be selling wine on their site.. I think our next meeting will be a lot more fun!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/06/cheers-amazon-to-enter-wine-busines...