EC2 and S3 Success Story

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:09:36 +0000

I’ve been building systems lately on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). At first, I was only interested in Amazon’s Simple Storage Solution (S3) after seeing the SmugMug slide show.

I hadn’t really considered using EC2 since we had more servers in colocation than I really needed. But I had a file storage problem. When you have a thousand files, you stick them in a directory. When you have a million files, you cannot simply stick them in a single directory. You distribute them across multiple directories. What a PITA.

Flexible Web Services

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:00:15 +0000

Things don’t change. You change your way of looking, that’s all.
— Carlos Castañeda

Early this spring, I made some big architectural changes in the company’s website. The two most far-reaching changes involved Amazon’s Web Services and Adobe’s Flex product. Sometimes you regret big changes. I only regret having not made the changes earlier.

I admit that I wasn’t always a flex fan. Indeed, I dismissed the flex out of hand in the early days mainly as a response to Macromedia’s steep pricing model. Ouch. Since then, Adobe had bought Macromedia and the pricing model changed several times. I never noticed. Such is the cost of writing something off.

S3 on Red Leopard

EC2 and S3 Success Story

Flexible Web Services