DIY YouTube August 28, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : web, virtualization , add a comment- Download one copy of Broadcast Machine.
- Install Broadcast Machine on an Amazon EC2 virtual machine.
- Upload your hilarious family videos to an Amazon S3 account, easily accessed via your EC2 virtual machine.
- Encourage your family, friends and co-workers to digg your site like crazy, whilst they too upload their hilarious family videos.
- Scale to taste via EC2’s SOAP web service API.
- Watch as Broadcast Machine and Amazon S3’s BitTorrent support help to reduce your bandwidth bills.
- Profit!
Commodity virtualization with Amazon EC2 August 25, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : virtualization , add a commentThe blogosphere is going batty talking about Amazon EC2; their ‘limited beta’ service for provisioning virtual Linux machine hosting via a web service API. The core idea isn’t anything new, I had a virtual Linux box with Bytemark Hosting back when they had one of the few virtual hosting offerings available. EC2’s web service API is just too cool however; think about the possibility of building a web application that can respond to increasing load, perhaps due to a Slashdotting/Diggdotting, through requesting to EC2 that more application/web server VM instances be brought online to satisfy the increased load.
A few other random thoughts:
- Do Amazon risk stretching their operational support capacity too far, between EC2, S3, SQS; oh, and the fact that they are running one of the biggest e-commerce operations around?
- What virtualization technology are they using? I initially wondered if it was VMware ESX but I am now hearing that it is Xen (no mention on the EC2 website itself though).
- Is there a potential market in selling pre-configured Amazon Machine Images to be hosted in EC2?
CardMeeting
Posted by James Webster in : web, development , 2 commentsThanks to Jason I’ve been clued onto Cardmeeting. Its an interesting take on distributed team collaboration that replicates index cards on a wall. Nothing can achieve the same tactile quality as physical index cards for planning or UML design but until we have ‘Minority Report’ style haptic interfaces this is a pretty good alternative for a distributed agile team.
Leave me a message on my CardMeeting (password is ‘thenewsbeforethenews’). I note that it is a Java applet as well, very retro, very Web 1.0!