Happy Thanksgiving

I have so much to be thankful for this year. A handsome 3 month old son, a beautiful and loving wife, a great family, and an awesome team of people that I get to work with everyday. Today was spent with friends and family and enjoying wonderful temperatures outside. It is very humbling to sit back at the end of the day today and think of how fortunate we are in this country with all of the amenties and comforts that we have. I hope that you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving and weekend! This picture was taken this week at the Grove Park Inn on my iPhone walking from my car. Looks like they were spared.

I HAVE to get one of these!

Photography is one of my favorite hobbies as many of you know.  I have actually been asked to combine some of my talks around Cloud Computing with some of my photography.  Today, I have that chance.  I saw a video today that has inspired me to post something here.  You know how those stabilization lenses can be very very expensive, well, nature has the answer in a much more advanced and cheaper form.  All you have to do is figure out how to attach your particular camera.  Take a look at the future of image stabilization.


Too bad it isn't a Turkey for Thanksgiving.  Maybe they have the same abilities!  Anyone know?

Amazon CDN CloudFront

That was fast!  It was just a couple of months ago that Amazon told us that they were working on a CDN.  Yesterday they took another step and told the world that it has arrived.  The new service is called CloudFront and it works in conjunction with S3.  To get started, you simply need to have content that you have placed into a publicly accessible bucket on S3 and a couple of API calls later, you have content that accessible from the cloud in CDN style.  Your S3 content is served from the closest location to the requester and is stored there for a period of time so that subsequent calls can be served quickly from that location.  The great thing is that it is not limited to the Seattle or DC locations for serving the content.  There are many other datacenters across the US (and the world) that are capable of serving the content helping to ensure speedy access.  I can only imagine that this will have other CDN providers very nervous.  They are already dropping their prices dramatically and this will squeeze them even further.

Google Voice Search on iPhone

Well, it is finally in the AppStore. The Google application now includes voice search. It took a little persistence to get it, but I was able to download it to my phone. When I did this last night, iTunes was not showing an update was available, but when I searched for the application and downloaded it again, it came with voice search. So, if it isn't there today for you, try just downloading the application again. My first search was on Cloud Computing. It did rather well I must admit.

Microsoft's Azure Sky

Well, I have waited for a while now to post on Microsoft's new cloud computing platform because I was waiting for something, well, of substance.  Does anyone else but me find it humourous that they have named their cloud computing effort Azure?  Makes me think of a cloudless day ironically.  I have said in the past that Microsoft is late to the game, and it looks like they are going to be even later.  Seems as if everything that they have to offer is still in preview mode and I have seen very few examples of working applications on the Live Services or Azure platform.  I do have the need to run some applications on Windows technology right now, and I was looking forward to Microsofts entry into cloud computing to see what I might be able to make use of, but with Amazon now offering Windows 2003 servers as AMIs I am wondering if the Azure platform will even be necessary.  Will Microsoft be able to compete with Amazon on price?  I think I will wait and see what the price model will be and how much they really intend to support the "Coming Soon" application languages and platforms such as Eclipse and PHP.

EC2 News More Than Expected

Wow, I was not expecting all of the announcements that happened today. I knew that EC2 was coming out of beta, that has been talked about for some time now, and we all knew that EC2 Windows boxes would be available this Fall, but I can't say that I was expecting the other news. It is exciting though for companies like DigitalChalk that rely on excellent services around cloud computing.

You can see everything that was announced today on the Amazon Web Services Blog. While I am excited about EC2 being out of beta and playing around with the new Windows instances starting at 12.5 cents per hour, the other news is even more interesting.

• Amazon released an SLA for EC2
• Amazon plans to release an AWS management console
• Amazon is planning to release load balancing, auto scaling and cloud monitoring services

That is a lot of WOW factor for one day. I am particularly interested in seeing what is possible with the management console and the load balancing, scaling and monitoring tools. This could be as simple as EC2 images preconfigured with HAProxy, Hyperic and other tools, or it could go as far as what RightScale offers with their tools.

There is much to look forward to!

Microsoft in the Cloud

Well, we knew it was coming... Microsoft has been working on a cloud computing initiative and today... Oops! Amazon beat them to the punch. Amazon announced today that they will be putting Windows on EC2 before the end of the year. This has to be a bummer for Balmer and company over at Microsoft who have been working on an initiative that should be announced next month. I am very interested to see how Amazon is pricing this and how they deal with Microsoft licensing. I really hope that they keep to the same model where they charge by the hour instead of throwing extra requirements for a valid license key for each server you stand up. That would defeat the purpose of "infinite" scalability. I haven't seen any talk about the model yet other than a mention of the same "pay as you go pricing", but I am sure interested in the nitty gritty details. I can't say for certain that we will be using Windows on Amazon at DigitalChalk, but I will be playing around on it you can be sure just to see how it performs.