by Andy Brudtkuhl on February 19, 2009
Every once in awhile I go on an Amazon S3 kick. Mainly – it’s because I love the service. But for the most part people are still confused about “cloud storage” and “content delivery networks“ and think you have to be a technology wizard to use them. This is not the case – there are some awesome tools that help you work with Amazon S3. We covered Mac apps for Amazon S3 and the latest S3Fox Plugin. This time we are going to discuss CloudBerry Explorer.
Features include:
- Manage Multiple S3 Accounts
- Share Buckets with Other Users
- Copy Between Buckets
- Support for Requester Pays
- Recursive Permission Management (great feature)
- Amazon CloudFront Manager
CloudBerry Videos
Overall if you are looking to manage your Amazon S3 on Windows PC, I’d go with CloudBerry Explorer or S3Fox. Both are great choices.
by Andy Brudtkuhl on February 19, 2009
I was pleased to open Firefox today to see an update S3Fox – a firefox plugin to manage Amazon S3. We use S3Fox extensively to manage Amazon S3 on our PC’s. There are some great new features I am very excited about. First off they have updated the interface to resemble the familiar paned layout of popular FTP clients.
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by Andy Brudtkuhl on January 20, 2009
Today we discussed why your business needs to use Amazon S3.
Well, we didn’t discuss how you actually use Amazon S3. Here are 4 apps you can use to manage your Amazon S3 account on your Mac…
1. Transmit (free trial, recommended)
We use Transmit for FTP on the Mac, so it was a natural fit to use it for Amazon S3 access. They say “Manage your simple storage service, Mac-style”. That’s a great explanation – it’s easy, simple, and just works. Download Transmit.
2. S3Fox – Firefox Plugin (free, also recommended)
S3Fox is a great solution to manage your Amazon S3 account on both a Mac and PC. We use it extensively on our PC’s – and sometime on the Mac when Transmit isn’t already open. S3Fox also helps you manage your Amazon CloudFront (CDN) service by setting up your distribution URLs and authorization. Download S3Fox.
3. S3Hub (free)
I’ve not personally tried S3Hub but seems to have the standard feature set – upload/download/folders/permissions – as the other S3 Mac clients do. However there are some killer features for S3Hub that put it at the top of my list for software to try. First off there is a share features that lets you give access to other S3 users – by sharing buckets and granting access to files with other. It will also let you automatically set permissions on newly uploaded files. You can also rename files – which you are surprisingly unable to do with Transmit. Download S3Hub.
4. Jungle Disk
I have also yet to give Jungle Disk a try because I’ve been happy using Transmit and S3Fox – and Jungle Disk isn’t free. But, I’ve heard good things about the service that claims to let you “store files and automatically backup data easily and securely to Amazon.com’s S3 Storage Service”. The Apple Blog says,
The best feature of Jungle Disk Desktop is the fact that your Jungle Disk mounts just like your iDisk – allowing you to access your files directly from the Finder. Drag and drop, copy and delete. You can use your Jungle Disk just like any other hard drive.
Download Jungle Disk
What software do you use to manage your Amazon S3 service on your Mac? Let us know in the comments!
by Andy Brudtkuhl on January 20, 2009
At 48Web, we use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for all of our business file storage, backups, and as a content delivery network. In past at startups I have been involved with we have had to purchase file servers for backup and network storage as well as media streaming servers. Now we have “cloud storage” that, buzz words aside, is really quite a rermarkable solution for a small startup business. There are no startup costs – you just sign up and pay for what you use.
So how do we use Amazon S3 for our business? First off we use it for file storage. If you have ever worked in any size business – you are likely familiar with “file servers” or “network drives” where a bunch of files are located that are accessible by authorized users in your company. We use Amazon S3 for that. It’s accessible anywhere – on any pc or mac – and has authentication and authorization roles so you can lock it down.
We also use Amazon S3 for all of our backups. We backup our WordPress sites to Amazon S3 regularly. Our Subversion (source control) repositories are automatically backed up to Amazon S3. And last, our PCs and Macs are backed up to Amazon S3. We are all taken care of – in “the cloud”.
Last we use Amazon S3 as a content delivery network. This CDN serves our images, videos, and podcasts to the websites we host. We do this for several reasons. Their Amazon CloudFront service:
“..gives businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments”
Well said. In addition to that Amazon CloudFront uses an “edge network” – distributed locations – for content delivery to ensure the best peformance. Think of this edge network like there are servers storing your multimedia content in Seattle, Chicago, and Boston. If I request your content here in Des Moines, IA it will grab the data from the Chicago server – because it’s the closest geographically.
If you have any questions about using Amazon S3 or CloudFront in your business, let us know!
by Andy Brudtkuhl on November 18, 2008
Two months ago I wrote about Amazon’s plans for launching a Content Delivery Network (What’s a Content Delivery Network?). Today, Amazon announced CloudFront – “a service designed with ease of use in mind from the very beginning.”
So what does this CDN have to offer?
“Today marks the launch of Amazon CloudFront, the new Amazon Web Service for content delivery. It integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3 to provide low-latency distribution of content with high data transfer speeds through a world-wide network of edge locations. It requires no upfront commitments and is a pay-as-you-go service in the same style as the other Amazon Web Services.
Amazon CloudFront has been designed to be fast; the service will cache copies of the content in edge locations close to the end-user’s location, significantly lowering the access latency to the content. High sustainable data transfer rates can be achieved with the service especially when distributing larger objects.” via Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon
Sounds pretty cool right? We will definitely be using this at 48Web for a new project we are launching soon… What for? Hosting and serving multimedia, images, and some downloadable material.
Do you have any questions about using a CDN for your website or business? Ask us questions in the comments or ask me directly.
