Amazon S3 keeps getting better, now supports versioning

A good thing really can get better! Amazon S3, perhaps the most well-known cloud computing infrastructure service, just got another upgrade. The simple storage service now supports versioning:
Versioning provides an additional layer of protection for your S3 objects. You can easily recover from unintended user errors or application failures. You can also use Versioning [...]

Tech stuff I’ve been learning about lately

I haven’t done one of these lists in quite a while, so I figured it was time for an update. Here are some of the geeky tech things I’m currently playing with/learning more about:
Facebook Connect
I’ve added support for Facebook Connect to ShareEdmonton, and was surprised at how straightforward it was. Little bit of a [...]

Mountains of data, right at your fingertips

Last week, two announcements caught my eye. The first was from Amazon.com, which announced that there is now more than 1 TB of public data available to developers through its Public Data Sets on AWS project. The second was from the New York Times, which announced its Newswire API, providing access all NYTimes articles [...]

Amazon Web Services: Still getting better

I often think back to 2006 when Dickson and I were in the midst of the VenturePrize business plan competition. It was around that time that Amazon.com launched their first web service, the Simple Storage Service (S3). It had a huge impact on our business, and we’ve been extremely happy customers ever since.
Over the [...]

What if Twitter had been built by Amazon.com’s Web Services team?

I’ve been using Twitter for a long time now, and I can’t remember a period of downtime quite as bad as the current one. Features have been disabled, and there’s no ETA for when everything will be back to normal. Who knows, maybe it won’t ever be. Which got me wondering about why Twitter’s [...]

Maybe Microsoft should buy Amazon instead

The Microsoft-Yahoo deal continues to be the hot topic in the blogosphere right now, with Techmeme still dominated by related discussion. The latest news is that Google has posted an official response to the proposed takeover. In general, discussion has moved from “can you believe what just happened” to “this deal with fail/succeed because…” If [...]

Amazon now offers an SLA for S3

Amazon announced on Monday the launch of an SLA, or Service Level Agreement, for the S3 web service. The lack of an SLA has always been cited as a “shortcoming” of S3, but I don’t know exactly how many customers have requested it. Enough for them to offer it I guess:

Basically, we commit to 99.9% [...]

Facebook continues to strengthen The Platform

Back in July I wrote about Microsoft’s so-called Cloud OS. There hasn’t been any Microsoft-specific news since then (that I’ve come across anyway) but more and more companies seem to be gearing up to offer cloud infrastructure services. Take Nirvanix for instance, an Amazon S3 competitor that launched earlier this month with some impressive features.
And [...]

Amazon FPS: another US-only payments service

Amazon launched another web service on Friday, called the Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS). The interesting thing about the launch is that Jeff Barr was teasing everyone on Twitter, building up the anticipation. I was eagerly watching for updates! I wish more product launches happened in a similar fashion.
Anyway, here is how Jeff described FPS:

We’ve [...]

Look out Amazon: Here comes Microsoft’s Cloud OS

If you’ve been following the news about Windows Live Core, also referred to as “Cloud OS”, then today’s article at News.com probably is nothing new. Still, it’s a good overview of what is known thus far:

In addition to making available its existing services, such as mail and instant messaging, Microsoft also will create core infrastructure [...]

New Pricing for Amazon S3

Late last night Amazon sent an email to S3 customers announcing an upcoming pricing change. Storage costs will remain the same, but the price for bandwidth is going to change:

Current bandwidth price (through May 31, 2007)
$0.20 / GB – uploaded
$0.20 / GB – downloaded
New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.10 per GB – all data [...]

Amazon Web Services Growth

Amazon.com released their fourth quarter and year end (2006) financials today, and tucked away inside the press release was a little information on how their relatively new Web Services division is doing:

Over 220,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services, up greater than 55% year-over-year.

Unfortunately – and this is often the case with these [...]

Amazon.com could power the new web

I have become really interested in Amazon.com over the last little while. The stuff they are doing with their web services platform is just amazing, and it is already having a huge impact on how web businesses are created and operate. We are using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) in Podcast Spot, and I absolutely [...]