The Open Cloud Computing Interface at IGT2009

December 4, 2009

Today I participated in the Cloud Standards & Interoperability panel at the IGT2009 conference, together with Shahar Evron of Zend Technologies, and moderated by Reuven Cohen. Reuven gave an overview of his involvement with various governments on the efforts to define and standardize “cloud”, and Shahar presented an overview of the Zend Simple Cloud API [...]

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How to Work with Contractors on AWS EC2 Projects

November 17, 2009

Recently I answered a question on the EC2 forums about how to give third parties access to EC2 instances. I noticed there’s not a lot of info out there about how to work with contractors, consultants, or even internal groups to whom you want to grant access to your AWS account. Here’s how. First, a [...]

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What Language Does the Cloud Speak, Now and In the Future?

October 27, 2009

You’re a developer writing applications that use the cloud. Your code manipulates cloud resources, creating and destroying VMs, defining storage and networking, and gluing these resources together to create the infrastructure upon which your application runs. You use an API to perform these cloud operations – and this API is specific to the programming language [...]

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Avoiding EC2 InsufficientInstanceCapacity: Insufficient Capacity Errors

October 17, 2009

Here’s a quick tip from this thread on the AWS EC2 Developer Forums. If you experience the InsufficientInstanceCapacity: Insufficient Capacity error, you’ll be glad to know there are some strategies for working around it. Justin@AWS offers this advice: There can be short periods of time when we are unable to accommodate instance requests that are [...]

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Alternatives to Elastic IPs for EC2 Name Resolution

September 27, 2009

How can you handle DNS lookups in EC2 without going crazy each time a resource’s IP address changes? One solution is to use an Elastic IP, a stable IP address that can be remapped to different instances, but Elastic IPs are not appropriate for all situations. This article explores the various methods of managing name [...]

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Cool Things You Can Do with Shared EBS Snapshots

September 24, 2009

I’ve been awaiting this feature for a long time: Shared EBS Snapshots. Here’s a brief intro to using the feature, and some cool things you can do with shared snapshots. I also offer predictions about things that will appear as this feature gains adoption among developers. How to Share an EBS Snapshot Really, it’s easy. [...]

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Solving Common ELB Problems with a Sanity Test

September 7, 2009

Help! My ELB isn’t serving files! Whoa! My back-end instances work but not the ELB! Hey! I can’t get the ELB to work! These are among the most common Elastic Load Balancer problems raised on the Amazon EC2 Discussion Forums. Inspired by Eric Hammond’s indispensible article Solving “I can’t connect to my server on Amazon [...]

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How to Keep Your AWS Credentials on an EC2 Instance Securely

August 31, 2009

If you’ve been using EC2 for anything serious then you have some code on your instances that requires your AWS credentials. I’m talking about code that does things like this: Attach an EBS volume Download your application from a non-public location in S3 Send and receive SQS messages Query or update SimpleDB All these actions [...]

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Amazon S3 Gotcha: Using Virtual Host URLs with HTTPS

August 18, 2009

Amazon S3 is a great place to store static content for your web site. If the content is sensitive you’ll want to prevent the content from being visible while in transit from the S3 servers to the client. The standard way to secure the content during transfer is by https – simply request the content [...]

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Elastic Load Balancer: An Elasticity Gotcha

August 14, 2009

If you use AWS’s Elastic Load Balancer to allow your EC2 application to scale, like I do, then you’ll want to know about this gotcha recently reported in the AWS forums. By all appearances, it looks like something that should be fixed by Amazon. Until it is, you can reduce (but not eliminate) your exposure [...]

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