Archive for September, 2007
So yesterday’s Amazon Web Services presentation went so much better than I could have ever imagined. We had a blast meeting so many new and interesting people who are dedicated to delivering some truly unique products. Two that stood out were AideRSS, which provides intelligent filtering to umanagable piles of RSS feeds and boasted the most amazing scaling of 100+ instances processing in parallel, and SeeMeWin.com, which has this quirky Japanese game show hook of watching people scratch lottery tickets. Part Jennicam, part “WTF seriously!?”, lead by a very engaging personality–Breck Yunits–SeeMeWin has the potential for localized traction among the 18-24 demographic.
The cap, though, was finding a link to this post, Amazon Web Services - EC2 - Wow!, in my email this morning.
There was also a lot of creativity leveraging EC2 to support production environment. Geezeo, located in Boston, have put everything on EC2: Front-end, app-servers, and database. Because MySQL replication and clustering is relatively easy, they could set up a small MySQL farm and then do frequent off-site backups to S3 (Amazon’s Simple Storage Service — you pay for that, but it’s not too expensive). Geezeo is sort of a mix of Quicken and Facebook. I’d been very leery of Geezeo because I don’t think I want my bank data up in the cloud. But after this presentation, I think they may have a good architecture for security; I might actually try them now. Which is saying a lot, because if you had told me their service was in EC2 before I saw their presentation, it would have actually increased my worry. They have SSL in the right places, and, apparently, private IPs running in EC2. Nice job.
Makes me feel real good about what we’ve built so far.
Here’s a copy of what we ran, Geezeo AWS Presentation and here’s what we built in EC2 (the part I’m crazy proud about!):
Well, vacation is officially over.
This afternoon myself and our CTO are speaking at The Startup Project. We’ll be covering what the company is about and how we are leveraging Amazon Web Services to get things done.
It should go well and hopefully I can steel my nerves enough to make it through my five minutes of the presentation without too much stammering and sweating! This is such a seismic shift from my last job where I was largely invisible and the expectation was that I remain so; here in the past month I have attended a technology mixer where I spent time shaking hands and getting the word out (on the technical end) of what we are and how we are doing it to now speaking to a captive audience. I’ll be more than happy, though, to slip back behind the command line and not be wrapped up in counting how many times I said “um” in a minute.
Wish me luck!
