S3, and the land grab in progress....
First of all, kudos to Amazon, whose new S3 looks to be an incredible product. Having tinkered a bit lately with the likes of the Nutch/Hadoop project, distributed, ultra-reliable storage has been on my mind.
Now, I can finally actually store all of my digital photos online. In a way I control. But also affordably. Alright, it's not quite as cheap as Streamload is working out to be, but the business model is clearly different (and Streamload's been having some responsiveness problems of late).
I'm eager to see what kinds of tools, both real web service and modifications to existing open source tools, come along. Finally, an uber-cheap LAMP host can provide all you really need to have all of the stuff you want at your fingertips - if you're willing to pay the monthly S3 bill that goes along with your current data usage. How many days until someone builds a version of the fine Gallery photo tool that stores your photos directly into S3?
The various "great things" S3 enables have been well covered on other blogs by now. Highlights, in my opinion, are guilt-free storage scaling, trivial https and (instant) torrent access for anyone, as well as the extremely low cost of entry. I didn't have an Amazon web service account until today, but it took literally 1 minute to add such functions to my Amazon account. I didn't even have to pull out my credit card, since Amazon already had it on file.
Finally, I have to (guiltily) comment on the land-grab in progress. S3 uses "buckets" as the top-level naming convention exposed to an account-holder. You declare that you want a bucket, and, if you're the first (or, presumably, it's currently unclaimed) you get it. The "bucket" is actually the first level of depth on the URL, ie, the "bucketname" in a url like this: http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucketname/myfile.txt. You can "only" have 100 on an account, but it costs nothing to grab one. I actually thought I'd screwed up my account credentials earlier today, because I couldn't create a bucket called "test" when I first started playing around - I guess I wasn't the first who wanted to test things out today. So, now that I figured that out, I went on a land grab - I now have the buckets "dist", "gadgetguy", "geekdom", "mirror", "source", and "torrent", among a few others. Not that there's any real reason to covet any of those buckets, but, at least for those that relate to domains I have, I won't have to fight with anyone.
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