Author: Jeff Barr

Over in the “practice what you preach” department, I’ve spent the last month or so uploading over 18,000 of my family pictures to Smugmug. Even though I store the photos on a RAID drive in my house and move regular DVD backups offsite, I am still relieved that someone else is worrying about my photos. […]

Aaron Koblin, developer of The Sheep Market, has published his thesis as a Word document: The Sheep Market: Two Cents Worth. It is fun to read, with some very far-ranging references and some entertaining diversions. It is interesting to read about Aaron’s hesitancy to be just a cog in a machine, then to see him […]

If you are interested in the art of evangelism, there’s an event coming up that you should attend. It’s called GNoTECon (Global Network of Technology Evangelists Conference), and will be held in Santa Clara, CA on December 4th. Microsoft’s Anand Iyer blogged about it recently, so I won’t repeat everything here. In fact, this is […]

In Userscript.org and Amazon S3, Jesse Andrews describes how he moved all of his static content from his own server over to S3. Jesse set up the virtual hosting, moved over all of the content (using S3 Fox no less), and had everything up and running inside of 15 minutes. As he notes “it took […]

There’s so much happening with Amazon EC2 that I can hardly read it all. Here’s a sampling: The Atlantis Computing blog talks about Amazin Amazon or why EC2 is the bee’s knees. Instead of investing between 30 and 40% of their seed capital on hardware, they have implemented it on top of EC2. As the […]

If you’ve got 17 minutes to spare, this TalkCrunch interview with Jeff  Bezos is worth a listen. In addition to learning more about our Web-Scale Computing initiative, you can hear Jeff’s famous laugh for yourself. There’s also a summary of the talk on TechCrunch. If that’s not enough, there’s another podcast interview over at Information […]

An important part of our mission as Web Services Evangelists is to encourage our developer community to innovate. We invite them to surprise us with new and interesting ways to consume our services, to show us the Power of Innovation ! One such innovation is running Windows Server 2003 on an Amazon EC2 instance. The […]

This photo was taken as our team was leaving the MIT Emerging Technologies Conference last month: So far the best caption we’ve come up with internally is “Excuse me, but can you tell us where the physics building is? And how do we find the Mensa Club?” If you’ve got a better one, leave us […]

Backing up data to Amazon’s Secure Storage S3 has been the hot-favorite-use-case for many companies. Webmail.us, the email hosting company, who is currently serving more than 27,000 businesses and hosting more than 350,000 paid mailboxes and growing by close to 10% per month, is now using amazon S3 for backing up encrypted email data. Smart […]

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud continues to impress the people who matter most: software developers (in this instance, an ISV). Genexus is an innovative software platform that enables non-technical business people to rapidly build out applications–including an online presence. Andres Aguiar, their chief architect, sent me a note yesterday to say “We have GXPortal running in […]