web services

Amazon EC2 News

by Andy Brudtkuhl on October 24, 2008

Today Amazon announced the general availability of EC2 – the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (I think that means it is out of beta). This means it now comes with a Service Level Agreement – which one would think will dramatically increase adoption rates by medium-large sized companies. The SLA provides a 99.95% availability commitment.

Amazon Web Services also announce the availability of the beta for EC2 running Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server.

Amazon EC2 will provide an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. Like all services offered by AWS, Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server offers a low-cost, pay-as-you-go model with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees. Pricing for Amazon EC2 running Windows Server begins at $0.125 per compute hour.

They also provided insights into future plans for 2009 to help companies using their services plan for future roll outs. These enhancements include:

  • Load balancing – Enables AWS customers to balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
  • Auto-scaling – Automatically grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements.
  • Cloud monitoring – Enables AWS customers to monitor operational metrics of Amazon EC2, providing visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.
  • Management Console – Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets customers manage and access their AWS cloud resources.

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Top 5 Social Media Applications

by Andy Brudtkuhl on July 9, 2008

Mike Fruchter posted a question that spurred a nice discussion on FriendFeed – “What are the social media applications you use the most?”

Well, here is my top 5 (at the moment, not in order) that I use on an hourly basis…

  1. Twitter
  2. FriendFeed
  3. Delicious
  4. Google Reader
  5. WordPress

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MagCloud – Publish your own Magazine

by Andy Brudtkuhl on June 25, 2008

MagCloudI love seeing industries get flipped and democratized using the Internet as a production and distribution tool. MagCloud is doing just that. Think Threadless or CafePress… It’s a classic crowdsourcing methodology. Give the community the power and ease to create while providing a platform for distribution and, in the case of these companies, monetization.

Simply put, MagCloud allows you to publish your own magazine.

MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we’ll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.

MagCloud costs nothing for the publisher because your magazines will be printed on demand. They handle everything, including payment, printing, and distribution – you just provide the content. You can charge whatever you want for your magazine above their production costs. But how does it look?

MagCloud uses HP Indigo technology to custom-print each issue when it’s
ordered. Printing on demand means no big print runs, which means no
pre-publishing expense. Magazines are brilliant full color on 80lb
paper with saddle-stitched covers. They look awesome.

I am currently waiting for an invitation from them to start publishing my first magazine. I have some fun ideas for it… Once they accept me I’ll let you know more…

Update: Digging deeper (actually not that deeper) I found MagCloud to be a project from HP Labs.

MagCloud is an HP Labs» research project evaluating new web services that will provide small independent magazine publishers, online content owners, and small businesses the ability to custom publish digitized magazines and economically print and fulfill on demand.

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