Contemplating the brave new present
Posted in AWS on Dec 31st, 2008
Amazon has announced an improved request signature protocol for authenticating HTTP requests sent to SimpleDB, to Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), or to the Simple Queue Service (SQS). The new protocol, version 2, fixes a security flaw in the version 1 signature algorithm.
The security flaw was identified by Colin Percival, who describes it in detail [...]
Posted in AWS on Dec 17th, 2008
A handy new graphical tool for working with the Amazon Simple DB service has been announced on the AWS Blog. SDB Tool is a Firefox plugin for querying and updating your Simple DB database domains.
The tool is very functional, if a bit rough around the edges. The interface is a bit intimidating and, on my [...]
I have long been irked by the difficulty of creating simple XML documents in Java code. While Java has excellent support for handling XML in general, if you just need to whip up a quick document — say, to interact with a web service API — you can quickly get lost in a messy quagmire [...]
Posted in AWS on Dec 10th, 2008
The eagle-eyed folks at RightScale have spotted a new EC2 feature guide document describing the long-anticipated release of Amazon EC2 Regions. In short, EC2 is now available in the EU region, with potentially more regions to follow.
This is great news for EC2 users who are located in Europe, or who have a large customer base [...]
Posted in AWS on Dec 10th, 2008
Amazon’s DevPay service graduated recently from beta to general availability, which means that it is now easier for companies in the United States to build a business based on Amazon Web Services.
DevPay allows you to sell your own applications based on Amazon’s storage (S3) and computing (EC2) services. You set the price that customers will [...]
Posted in AWS on Dec 2nd, 2008
Amazon’s SimpleDB online data storage and querying service is now in unlimited public beta, which means that you can sign up for the service and have your account activated immediately. Previously, new users had to wait an indeterminate amount of time until they were granted access to the limited beta.
Amazon has also changed the [...]