Blogs by Magic

Amazon EC2 / TurnKey Hub related changes:

• Hub does TKL 11: TurnKey Hub now deploys TurnKey Linux 11 images by default, though support for older legacy images is still available to ease migration.

• Basic pre-launch configuration: No more having to fiddle with the default passwords after an instance launches. TurnKey Hub now supports pre-seeding appliance configuration before launch. This makes up for not having console access that would usually be required for first boot configuration.

• TKLBAM pre-initialization: No more having to cut and paste your Hub APIKEY to initialize TKLBAM. The TurnKey Hub pre-initializes TKLBAM automatically when the instance is first launched.

• Upgradeable Kernels: We've figured out how to make it easy update the kernel.

  Kernel upgrades were previously not supported on Amazon EC2, because each Amazon Machine Image (AMI) had to be associated with a specific Amazon Kernel Image (AKI). Now instead of associating the image to a specific kernel, we associate it with a special EC2 compatible bootloader (pv-grub), which can bootstrap whatever kernel is configured from within the system (e.g., security fix).

TurnKey gets better and better. There really is no other solution like this. Massive respect to this team of engineers.

I have a feeling that TurnKey is going to end up being a massive force as more people launch into AWS. I'm surprised they don't have a bigger following now. Bad marketing, I guess.

If you have invested in virtualization to meet IT security, compliance, or configuration management requirements and are now looking at the cloud as the next step toward the future, I've got some good news for you.

VM Import lets you bring existing VMware images (VMDK files) to Amazon EC2. You can import "system disks" containing bootable operating system images as well as data disks that are not meant to be booted.

This new feature opens the door to a number of migration and disaster recovery scenarios. For example, you could use VM Import to migrate from your on-premises data center to Amazon EC2.

You can start importing 32 and 64 bit Windows Server 2008 SP2 images right now (we support the Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions). We are working to add support for other versions of Windows including Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 R2. We are also working on support for several Linux distributions including CentOS, RHEL, and SUSE. You can even import images into the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Please add Linux support. Please add Linux support. Please add Linux support.

So it turns out Quora, the new question/answer service that keeps popping up, has set up Twitter accounts for most of its popular topics. That’s not necessarily revolutionary, except for the number of feeds they have and the way they’re setting them up. Turns out they’re using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to create new accounts, as there is no way to do it programmatically. This is interesting to me for two reasons: First, I’ve been obsessed with Mechanical Turk for a long time and second, it speaks to what I think the service has eventually become.

Glad to see someone is using it. Like Noah, I too have been somewhat obsessed with finding ways for using such a service.

Solving CAPTCHAs to create spam accounts though…not exactly what I had in mind.

Tens of millions of people have moved to Google Docs because it’s 100% web: it provides real-time collaboration in the browser, with no software to install, manage or upgrade. Of course, we know that many more of you still use Microsoft Office, because until recently, there weren’t many tools to help you collaborate and share with others. Now there’s more choice.

To help smooth the transition from Office to the cloud, my teammates and I founded a company called DocVerse, which was acquired by Google earlier this year. Over the last 9 months, we’ve been hard at work moving the DocVerse product to Google’s infrastructure. We’ve also renamed it Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. Today, we’re pleased to take the next step towards a public launch and make it available to early testers.

I find it particularly interesting how far Google goes to "innovate" on behalf of their competition. They could do what Microsoft has done for years—spend buckets of money on advertising in an attempt to get people to use their software—but instead they actually make Microsoft's products better with a little Google flavor.

First Google Chrome Frame, now this. One of the biggest problems with Microsoft Word and Excel is how easy it is to lose your work in the event of a crash or corrupt file. Well, Google just fixed that.

In the last year or two we've added free tiers of service to Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SimpleDB. We have learned that developers like to be able to try out our services without having to pay to do so. In many cases, they have created non-trivial applications that can run entirely within the free tier of a particular service.

Today, we're going to go a lot farther. How far? Really far!

Effective today (November 1, 2010), we're opening up a new free tier for all new AWS developers. Here's what you get each month when you combine the existing free tier with this announcement:

• 750 hours of free time on an Amazon EC2 Micro instance running Linux. You can use this to run one of the Amazon Linux AMIs or any other non-paid Linux AMI. This time cannot be used to run the new SUSE Linux AMIs, the IBM AMIs, or the Microsoft Windows AMIs.
• 10 GB/months of Elastic Block Storage, 1 GB of snapshot storage, and 1 million I/O requests. This is enough space for the Amazon Linux AMI among others.
• 750 hours of Elastic Load Balancer time and 15 GB of data transfer through it.
• 5 GB/months of Amazon S3 storage, along with 20K GETs and 2K PUTs.
• 15 GB of internet data transfer out, and 15 GB of internet data transfer in.
• 100K Amazon SQS requests.
• 100K Amazon SNS requests, along with 100K HTTP notifications and 1K email notifications.
• 25 Amazon SimpleDB machine hours and 1 GB of storage.

Wow. Free. Crazy.

Ready to have some people start playing with my new project: http://notepad.cc/

Here's a neat little web application made by Jacbo Bijani, Tumblr's creative director. It's one of those things that's so simple you have to wonder why no one has thought of it before. It's a little notepad-esque application that allows for simple collaborative text editing.

Not sure what it was written in. Seems like one of those projects that could be written in few hundred lines of code, if that.

Cool stuff. Check it out. :)

One step closer to NEVER having to use Microsoft Office again. Hallelujah!

If they could just make the spreadsheet application a little more robust, or integrate it better with the Google Fusion Tables API, I'd never have to use Excel ever again. I'll take either one.

Some day we'll have fast enough connections to do this properly. It's a shame that you can't run OS X under virtualization. You can run OS X Server apparently (only on Apple hardware as of current, IIRC).

It's almost affordable create a VNC solution using Amazon S3, EC2, Xen to create a completely virtual desktop that lives entirely in the cloud. Amazon EC2 gives you 20-cores (at about 1.0GHz each), 7GB of RAM and 1690GB of local storage for $0.68/hr. That's less than $5.44 for 8 hours. Not bad. I wonder if anyone has ever tried using a virtual solution like this as a practical desktop solution. I think I need to play around with this.