Downloading EXE files from S3

It is more than a little frustrating that Internet Explorer and Windows cannot do anything to match what the other major browsers and operating systems are doing, or so it seems.  Internet Explorer has long been the browser that most developers hate to support.  Today, I ran across something that wasn't HTML or CSS related but still caused issues on Windows using Internet Explorer.

As many of you know, I use Amazon Web Services to do much of my work and S3, Simple Storage Service, is a large part of what I work with.  Today, I was made aware that someone could not download an EXE file from S3 onto their desktop.  I tested it out, and it was fine for me.  Classic developer response right? Turns out, it worked for me because I was using Chrome on my Mac.  It didn't work quite right in Internet Explorer on Windows.  The file would download, but it would not bring down the extension to the file.  What I mean, is if the file was stored in S3 as "filename.exe", when it was downloaded to the Windows machine it would only be named "filename".   I was encouraged by some people that I know to simply chalk it up to a security concern, and while I do not encourage anyone downloading random .exe files and installing them, I knew that this just couldn't be the case.  As it turns out, Internet Explorer must be told the Content-Disposition of the file when it is an EXE or DLL.  This is done in the headers when the file is requested.  Luckily, S3 allows you to put metadata on a file that is passed down when the file is requested.  To allow Internet Explorer to recognize and save the file with the .exe extension you will just need to add the Content-Disposition:attachment; filename=<filename.exe> header.

You can do this as metadata in S3 through the AWS console.  Many of the software utilities that work with S3 also allow you to set this metadata programmatically when storing the objects.

I am used to all sorts of JavaScript, HTML, CSS problems when working with IE, but this one really threw me for a loop at first.  I hope that this helps you.

DigitalChalk takes SCORM to the Amazon Cloud

DigitalChalk, a learning management system serving the continuing education and professional training markets announces SCORM support on the Amazon Cloud.   

Infinity Learning Solutions, the parent company of DigitalChalk announced today that they have successfully released the fall 2010 Aristotle 4 version with full SCORM 1.2 support. SCORM 1.2 compliant content is now available in all editions of DigitalChalk including Free, Pro, Business and School. DigitalChalk also added a checkpoint enhancement to the Chalkboard Editor, a browser based multimedia lesson studio that is included in DigitalChalk. The Checkpoint feature lets instructors insert interactive prompts and questions into a multimedia presentation through the browser.

"Introducing SCORM support to DigitalChalk significantly expands the options our clients have for reusing existing content as well as broadening the range of compatible authoring tools we support," said Tony McCune, VP of Sales at ILS. "DigitalChalk is the first subscription based LMS that we are aware of running in the Amazon Cloud."

"Hosting a SCORM compliant system in an advanced cloud computing platform such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) poses some unique challenges. SCORM uses communication specifications that were originally designed before the cloud was invented. We took a system with it’s own personality and wove the SCORM specification into it," said Troy Tolle, Chief Technology Officer of ILS. "The team accomplished the task in an innovative and highly scalable fashion. There was no impact to the thousands of organizations currently delivering courses on DigitalChalk today."

The SCORM specification was originally created by the US Department of Defense. Introducing SCORM into DigitalChalk helps address the growing demand from the US federal government for scalable software as a service (SaaS) learning management systems on the Apps.gov cloud infrastructure, which is modeled after the AWS system.

"Not only is DigitalChalk an industry leader in delivery of online training and continuing education, DigitalChalk is the first Learning Management System to build a SCORM compliant system in the cloud using Amazon Web Services that we are aware of," said Wes Hester, CEO of Foxhole Technologies, a VA based federal IT services company.

To learn more about DigitalChalk, visit www.DigitalChalk.com or call toll-free in the US at 877-321-2451.    To learn more about Foxhole Technology and DigitalChalk in the Federal Market, please visit http://www.foxholetechnology.com/technology/cloud/digitalchalk.html. GSA Schedule 70: GS-35F-0569V
You can read more about the SCORM specification from Advanced Distributed Learning at www.adlnet.gov.

Creativity for Amazon's Cloud Computing Continues

Amazon Web Services continues to move forward in innovative ways to get people to take advantage of their services. Two announcements last month enhance the EC2 service pricing and the Cloud Front delivery model. The availability of auction price instances (spot instances) in EC2 and the ability to do true Flash streaming from Cloud Front really put the squeeze on traditional hosting and edge delivery companies.
With the new Spot Instances in EC2 you can take advantage of the excess capacity that Amazon is not using at that time. Because that capacity changes as more instances are started, the price for those instances fluctuate. With good planning, this can be used to really save on cash. Over the past 20 days, the price of a Spot Instance has been less than 50% of the price of a regular priced instance much of the time. If you are considering using EC2 for some bursting tasks and quick turn around, I would look at the Spot Instances first. Because you set the price you want to pay and the price changes over time, your instance may be terminated if your price is less than the Amazon rate. For this reason, you must plan ahead when using them in a production situation. One good strategy here to lower your costs would be to purchase some Reserved Instances that will stay running and then start Spot Instances in peak situations. You can use the AWS API to see the current prices of the Spot Instances to know how to set your price at runtime. If you want to see the prices online and over time, you can use the AWS console or some other sites like Cloud Exchange. Because you cannot reserve Windows instances right now on Amazon, it makes a lot of sense to take advantage of the Spot Instances. As I write this, a small Windows instance is $0.12 an hour and you can have the same thing running as a Spot Instance for $0.042 an hour.

At about 1/3 the price of a standard small instance, it makes it very attractive to use the Spot Instances right now.

The announcement of streaming support from Cloud Front is also a great new addition. Delivering content to the end user from the closest data center helps improve performance. Until now, all that could be delivered was static content and progressive downloads. Streaming video from Cloud Front helps reduce your costs because only the viewed parts need to be delivered. It also does not store the file on the end user's machine. You can use Cloud Front to deliver videos in several formats, even H.264 allowing playback on the iPod and iPhone. Thank you Amazon!

CloudFront Added to AWS Console

The Amazon Web Services management console has a new addition. A new tab appeared this morning at the top of the console at http://console.aws.amazon.com allowing you to manage your CloudFront distributions.

Using the console, you can choose to create a new distribution, select the bucket from within S3 and add up to 10 CNAME entries for the distribution. This functionality is convenient, but is not the functionality that I would have liked to see added to the console next as you have been able to do all of this with S3Fox for several months now.  I was hoping to see the management functions for CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling to appear in the console.  These should be available in the console this year I have been told, but it was wishful thinking to expect them this early in the year.

Amazon Import/Export

After a recent talk that I gave on cloud computing, one of the attendees contacted me with some questions about the "safety" of the data and also wanted to talk about vendor lock-in.  It is no secret that I am a fan of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform and so it followed that these questions all had to do with the way Amazon stores the data.  While these are typical questions, today the second question became much easier to answer.  Amazon Web Services announced the availability of AWS Import/Export.  Quite simply, Amazon is offering its customers a very easy way to ship a disk of data to them and they will push it into S3 to your specifications or grab your data out of S3 and put it on the disk for you.  This is very attractive because it can take days to actually move hundreds of GB on your office network into or out of S3 because of the simple limitations of bandwidth at the average workplace.  I am not a fan of vendor lock-in and have thought long and hard how to avoid it.  Any code that we write storing to and from Amazon's infrastructure is isolated enough so that we can switch it to another provider by reimplementing that single area. But, the fact still remains that it would take weeks to move all of our data and it would have to be done over an extended period of time. A strategy for this is to move data between two cloud providers instead of bringing it down locally and putting it back up. While moving over a backbone is still going to be faster, it will not be optimal.  With AWS Import/Export you are one step closer.  For $80.00 and $2.49 per hour, you can currently have all of the data on a disk pushed into Amazon's cloud and the export facility is coming soon.  I commend Amazon for providing so many tools and conveniences.