So last week it was announced that the BBC would be launching an Adobe AIR version of it’s highly successful iPlayer – but at the 2nd day keynote of Microsoft’s PDC it would seem that a new version built on Silverlight could has been prototyped by MS Technology Centre – could that be replacing the current Flash version on the web?
More details at http://www.marcmywords.org/post/BBC-iPlayer-in-the-Mesh.aspx
Until Thursday of last week I’ve never had any success getting a *Nix based system up and running on Amazon EC2 – but since the release of Windows based machines I’ve been much more successful.
Just in case you’ve not played with it yet, it’s super simple and what’s better is you don’t even have to touch a command line once – us Windows folk like that :). It can all be managed by ElasticFox a neat management plug-in for Firefox.
Once you’re in ElasticFox you see a list of public AMIs (Amazon Machine Images). These are basically starter machines to get you up and running. There are a heap of Windows (DataCenter edition) machines, both 32 and 64 bit, anonymous and authenticated system, with/without SQL Server standard and also a machine with SQL Server Express, IIS, ASP.NET.
I’m not going to cover the ins and outs of getting a machine up and running because there’s a doc here that covers it all.
When it comes to creating an instance of your chosen AMI you get to chose the instance type,
These correspond to machines ranging from a single processor with 1.7Gb RAM upwards – m1, large was a dual processor with 7.8Gb RAM. I did find that if I try to boot a 64 Bit system using m1, small I received an error message
InvalidParameterValue: The requested instance type’s architecture (i386) does not match the….
..so be careful of that. Anyhow, once you’ve got an instance of a system booted you login via RDP and you’re good to go. Or are you?
All you’ve done this far is boot an instance of an existing machine – you’re free to install software (although there’s no i386 folder if you choose a plain machine without IIS so you can’t (easily) install it). I whipped up a machine running Apache, PHP, MySQL and then slapped on Wordpress (just because it’s quick to get up an running!). If I were to terminate this instance at this point I’d loose what I’ve setup so far *BUT* if were to reboot the machine, say following a Windows Update then my instance comes back up as I left it with the update applied.
To persist a machine (and to allow you to create multiple instances of it) you have to create your own private AMI from this new instance. It’s a relatively trivial process which bundles your AMI onto Amazon S3 for storage and then allows you to create instances of that AMI.
Then there’s another Amazon product, Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) which gives you a persistent storage volume that you can connect to your instances (also via ElasticFox). It mounts directly as a drive via some clever voodoo and you just treat it as such.
So what does all this mean for a CF developer? It’s pretty easy to get a CF server up and running – remember though that the c/d drives are not persisted unless you’ve bundled it into an AMI, so any further configurations etc would need to be bundled up for persistence – CF could be run from an EBS volume although I’d be more inclined to keep that in the AMI and use an EBS volume just for storage. Equally, databases would be best stored on the EBS volume.
When Amazon introduces load balancing between instances then things will get more interesting and if you’re using ColdFusion then the usual administrative tasks like keep settings synchronised across instances could be fun (unless you use CAR files??) along with licensing issues if you start running multiple instances and not necessarily if it’s running on the same underlying hardware.
If you’ve been keeping up to speed with Railo then one of it’s really neat features is the server synchronisation that is able to keep settings in sync across a cluster – something I think that Adobe seriously needs to consider adding as it would be a great help, not only for ‘cloud scenarios’ but for Enterprise level clients as a whole.
Now Amazon’s announcement and launch of Windows based EC2 comes only a few days before Microsoft is expected to announce it’s offering in the guise of Microsoft Strata and a project code named RedDog (Incidentally, Strata means ‘Loss’ in Polish’) on Monday (today) at it’s PDC keynote – all eyes will be on what Microsoft release and the direction that they’re taking into the cloud.
Still labelled as ‘beta’ Microsoft Windows 2003 has made its debut on Amazon EC2 with prices ranging from $0.125 per hour up to $1.2 per hour for a plain Windows environment whilst Windows plus SQL servers ranges from $1.1 per hour up to $2.4 per hour.
More importantly Amazon EC2 has removed its beta label (for Linux) after 2 years of operation and a much required SLA has been provided with a 99.95% availability with service credits provided in the event of availability falling below this level.
They’re also talking about stuff that’s going to be coming in the future - a management console, load balancing and auto scaling! Way cool!
More information here
One of the really useful tools I use is Jungle Disk. It acts as a proxy to my Amazon S3 storage and maps a network drive so I can access my storage pretty darn easy. The latest version of it’s JungleDisk Desktop is a great app and well worth checking out if you make use of Amazon S3.
Yesterday, Rackspace acquired Jungle Disk along with Slicehost a Xen-based virtual machine hosting company. Rackspace’s aim is to use these new acquisitions to support ‘Mosso’ – it’s cloud hosting division which includes CloudFS which offers the same as Amazon’s S3 service along with Cloud Servers using the Slicehost technology.
Moving forwards, JungleDisk will all connections to either Amazon or Rackspace cloud storage.
To read more visit here
After a long summer hiatus the UKCFUG is back with a new website and a new look – and more importantly a meeting scheduled on 6th November at 7pm at the Design UK offices. More details are available at http://www.ukcfug.org – Mango powered too!
The guys are putting some serious effort behind the CFUG this year and with the increased profile of ColdFusion in the Adobe line up isn’t it time you checked out the CFUG? Also, you can join the Facebook UKCFUG group to keep updated.
At some point in the coming months I’m going to be giving a presentation on “Virtualising the Data Centre” and what it means for a developer and some of the really cool things it lets you do.
My iPod Touch (soon to become an iPhone tomorrow) is almost perfect – it now does everything I need it to do – but one thing I really want is ‘Smart Playlists’.
I know we build Smart Playlists in iTunes. For example – I have a list that is of my unlistened podcasts. When I listen to a podcast the play count gets increased and it disappears from the list (IN ITUNES!). It would seem pretty simple to then allow the play list on the iPod to be a little more intelligent and match what iTunes does and not show items that don’t now match the rule so my rule is truly ‘smart’ and is only of my unlistened podcasts.
Is that asking too much Apple?
At the moment when you do a search you get results formatted by Google, Google does have the Google Custom Search Engine product which allows you to restrict results to certain sites and the ability to (partly) customise how the results look but if you don’t want ads displayed you have to pay anything from $100 per year (depending on search volume).
A post here suggests that Google might be about to offer RSS feeds of search results. This will be great news – we should now be able to (license permitting) format the results to look just like our own sites so the fact the results are coming from Google is almost transparent – I imagine there’s going to be some restrictions and ‘powered by google’ logos required etc but on the whole this could be big – particularly if you want to get results into something other than a webpage! eg for those vanity Google searches of your own name straight into your RSS reader! 
A new feature currently in Gmail Labs prevents those accidental emails that you really didn’t mean to send either late at night or perhaps after a little too much liquor by giving you a mathematical challenge to complete to verify your state of mind…it’s description from the Gmail labs page (settings > labs in gmail)
Google strives to make the world’s information useful. Mail you send late night on the weekends may be useful but you may regret it the next morning. Solve some simple math problems and you’re good to go. Otherwise, get a good night’s sleep and try again in the morning. After enabling this feature, you can adjust the schedule in the "General" settings page.
More info on the Gmail blog
Last week Amazon announced that it will be offering Windows based EC2 instances as well as Microsoft SQL server instances later this fall (incidentally I had to look up when ‘fall’ is – apparently it starts 23 September). Their press release obviously talks about hosting ASP.NET applications but it will be interesting to see how other application platforms will behave – obviously now with a Windows license involved there’s going to be additional cost involved but Microsoft have a Windows license aimed squarely at Virtualisation (Microsoft Windows Datacenter edition) which like Adobe ColdFusion Enterprise permits unlimited virtual instances. Of further note will be how Amazon commission new Windows instances given it’s fussy-ness for unique identifiers for machines etc.
To find out more go to aws.amazon.com/windows
So on the 12th September, Marie and I tied the knot and started out our married life. We held the ceremony near to our home town of Guildford, UK – of course in traditional fashion the bride was late (15 minutes) but other than that the day went without a hitch. We had a great time and hope all our friends did too.
On Sunday we jetted off to Greece for a two week sailing Flotilla around the South Ionian sea. Basically it’s follow my leader with about 12 yachts (32 foot+) – we’re told where to go each day and what time to get in to port by, sail for the day and then we have a siesta before we go out for dinner and the odd drink or too! It was simply amazing and the people we spent the two weeks were so diverse, for example – Amy Winehouse’s former PA, the Global Marketing Manager of Nokia…and of course us!
So now we’re getting back to normal reality and appreciating the finer details of life – like putting toilet paper down the loo (this is a big no no in Greece!).
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