rawsug.org

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...

I suppose blogging isn't helping me get stuff done, but at least I get to vent!
So the lifeguard project has gotten some attention since the newsletter came out. Up to 19 downloads now! I really need to get back to it. I posted my todo list in the lifeguard forum.
I'm also working on elasticweb. I'm testing my first piece of code now and need to code up much more. I need to design a voting system whereby nodes in the web tier can decide as a collective, how to scale up or down to meet load. My goal is to make them all peers so that no one node is responsible for the rest. That should help eliminate any critical points of failure.

ok, back to coding!

links;
http://code.google.com/p/lifeguard/
http://code.google.com/p/elasticweb/