Scott Yang's Playground » Amazon

Amazon Web Service Introducing Elastic Beanstalk

scotty — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:28:18 +0000

Amazon WS is introducing Elastic Beanstalk. Just upload the code and see it scale, targeting Google AppEngine and Heroku users.

Amazon SimpleDB

scotty — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 02:09:10 +0000

Amazon SimpleDB — released last week that provides access to a scalable storage of structured data via a REST API, which runs along side with EC2 and S3 to provide the “scalable backend” for online applications. Comments over the weekend have ranged from “it sucks” to “who needs Oracle/MSSQL/DB2?”. I personally won’t be using it. It won’t scale down as much as FOSS DBs like MySQL or PostgreSQL which are virutally free with your shared hosting. It “might” scale up (which has not yet been proved), but it will soon become very expensive. 10GB/domain is a big show-stopper, latency sucks for database-intensive applications, query time limited to 5 seconds, and no inter-domain queries. Sounds like it’s no good for any serious RDBMS-replacement work. It will also force you to code your applications specifically for that platform, just like S3. Vendor lock-in anyone?

Jeff Bezos Talking About S3 and EC2 on TalkCrunch

scotty — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 01:50:47 +0000

TalkCrunch: Interview with Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, talking about their web services business unit, and all the weird usage of S3 and EC2. ~~The Matrix~~ Amazon is really doing some great stuff amongst web developers at the moment, and with the infrastructural services they provided you can easily scale to the next MySpace or YouTube. I’ve just got my beta application of EC2 approved, and now I just need to think about what I am going to use it for. Also what I wrote about EC2 when it launched almost 3 months ago.

Zettabyte Storage zBox

scotty — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 03:53:07 +0000

Via AWS Blog, zBox is a PowerPC-based NAS box that automatically backs up itself to Amazon S3, so that you have the short latency advantage of LAN storage, and redundancy of online storage at the same time. They can even detect degrading disk drives and send you a new one preemptively. After several disk drive incidents over the years, I think it’s a perfect solution. Except it’s a bit costly — $49 a month for a 30GiB drive? Maybe I’ll continue to use this hacked rsync script to my DreamHost account.

Buying Technical Books in Australia

scotty — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 07:58:13 +0000

Just bought a programming related book on-line. It was released in Q2 2006 so I did not consider the second hand book market. I went straight to the oracle asking where can I find it in on-line bookshops in Australia.

Only a handful of shops returned, and LSL Australia is around $10 cheaper than the big guys, although both are cheaper than the RRP. Who buy things at RRP these days anyway. Except, if you are a student and shopped in Co-op Bookshop, which happened to be the most expensive of them all.

Sounds like LSL is the one to go? However, there’s a Dymocks 50 metres from the building where I work, and it costs $11 for LSL to post the book to my office. D’oh.

I ended up buying the book from the big A, and it will be shipped from the States in 2 weeks. The listed price is less than half of Dymock’s “special price”, and even if you factor in the postage (about half the cost of the book) and plus 10% GST (just for the sake of comparison), it is still a good 7 bucks cheaper than LSL’s listed price without the delivery. Not to mention Amazon’s shopping cart is probably one of the best out there for your Wow experience.

I guess no one can really compete against Amazon for their volumes. Or is that so? Where do you buy your technical books in Australia?