Author: Jeff Barr

Paul Dowman created something really useful for the Ruby on Rails Community: a Pre-configured Ruby On Rails Stack AMI that “just simply works”. Public AMIs are pre-packaged, pre-configured, compressed file-system blobs that are stored on Amazon S3 which can be instantiated by any Amazon EC2 user. Ruby on Rails cuts down development time significantly due […]

Note: The Simple Monthly Calculator described in this post, while still functional, has been superseded by the newer and more powerful set of AWS TCO Calculators. We created a JavaScript-based tool that allows you to calculate your monthly cost for using Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, and Amazon SQS. This tool incorporates the latest pricing changes […]

Just a quick post to act as a heads up on two additions to the AWS Developer Resource Center. First, I recently interviewed Doug Kaye, who is CTO of GigaVox Media, about their experience with Amazon Simple Queue Service (aka Amazon SQS). The interview runs approximately 9 minutes, and offers some insight by Doug. I […]

The first-ever AWS Developer Chat in Second Life was a big success and a whole lot of fun to boot. We had about 20 people (avatars) in attendance and we talked about Amazon S3, EC2, and all kinds of other related subjects. Here’s a picture taken by my friend Betsy Weber (who has a really […]

As more and more people now move their production apps on Amazon S3, we are getting emails from CEOs and CTOs about their success and how Amazon S3 helped them sleep better at night. Last week I blogged about live-blogging backed by Amazon S3 and their 2-hour-$10-scaling app. This week its Pictogame. As Louis Choquel, […]

Couple of cool widgets available that enable you to earn Amazon Associate commisions. The first is the Amazon Browser Widget, which their website describes as “The Amazon Browser widget is a mini-Amazon browser that allows you to search for items at Amazon. As a user scrolls through the displayed items, it automatically loads additional items […]

The Space Program Blog has some good EC2 Best Practices.  These include: automate everything, scale early, and keep your database as small as possible. Refer to the post for more details, and please feel free to add your own suggestions there as comments. — Jeff;

Middlepost is an online document collaboration and storage tool powered by Amazon EC2, SQS, and S3. The site manages the entire creation, revision, and signing process for documents. During creation and revision, Middlepost tracks all of the changes and comments associated the document, supporting both internal and external collaborators. Each collaborator has a profile with […]

For the last several months my team and I have been experimenting with a self-serve scheduling model. In essence we create a wiki page, announce it on this blog, and then invite interested parties to add themselves to our schedules. This model has been working really well. We get to meet with a lot of […]

I blogged about Sitening.com’s Live Blogging Experiment yesterday. They were trying to capture the live feeds from Steve Job’s Keynote at WWDC 2007 Event. For the past several years, any site which live-blogged the event would become hopelessly buried in traffic. They built a small admin tool that periodically encapsulates the content every minute or […]