post past :: james murty

Amazon is working on an interesting new feature for the S3 service: Object versioning.

Once you enable versioning for one of your S3 buckets, any time you change an object in that bucket a version of the prior object will be stored in addition to the latest one. You can then perform operations on prior object versions such as retrieving older data, restoring “deleted” objects, and generally maintaining a fail-safe history of everything that happens in the bucket.

This will be a boon to anyone who is worried about their S3 data being accidentally deleted or corrupted by user/computer error.

The feature is currently in early beta form and is available for testing with buckets located in the “us-west-1″ location. You can read about the current functionality here: Versioning Beta Design.

Better still, you can grab the latest JetS3t code from CVS and try it out for yourself! The code samples file CodeSamples.java now includes a section called “Bucket Versioning (Beta)” to get you started.

Both the versioning feature itself and JetS3t’s support for it are in an early stage so watch out for warts.

As of a couple of weeks ago the latest version of JetS3t 0.7.2 has been available as a public release. In the pre-holiday rush I forgot to post a notification to my own blog.

This release includes some bug fixes, more sophisticated configuration options for the “filecomparer” component that manages file synchronizations, and supports the two major new CloudFront API features: private distributions and streaming distributions.

Visit the JetS3t web site to download the latest release and view the latest documentation such as code samples and the API Javadoc.

You can read about the complete list of changes in the release notes. And for the Maven-ites among you the official Maven2 repository has also been updated.

Amazon has just announced a new private content feature for their CloudFront content distribution service.

This feature allows you to control access to S3 objects you distribute through CloudFront by making them available only through specific distributions, or by requiring the use of signed URLs that you generate and provide to privileged users.

As of this evening the latest JetS3t codebase (available from the CVS repository) has full support for the new features, including the ability to:

• create and update private distributions
• manage Origin Access Identifiers, which are required for private distributions
• generate canned and custom-policy signed URLs for private distributions that require request signing.

These new features are not yet available in a stable packaged release but I plan to provide the next stable version before the end of November.

Rackspace has launched a public beta of their Cloud Servers API.

The Cloud Servers product allows you to rent computing resources and is a competitor to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Rackspace has a comparison page that describes, from their perspective, the advantages of their offering over EC2.

Some key differences from EC2 include:

• Cloud Servers has a wider range of server sizes available at the low end, with a minimum size of 256MB RAM that has a price of only $10.95 per month.
• Public IP addresses can be shared among multiple servers.
• The service supports dynamic resizing (vertical scaling) of servers to a degree. Unlike EC2, you can increase or decrease the computing power available to a single server without the need to manually start a new instance and redeploy your application to the new instance. However this scaling, while easy, isn’t instantaneous — behind the scenes Rackspace’s service actually starts a new server and copies everything across for you, so there is likely to be some downtime.
• A simpler RESTful API with support for JSON messages in addition to XML.

I am not yet familiar enough with Cloud Servers to give a detailed comparison with EC2, but it seems to be a full-featured service that is aiming to address some of the difficulties people face when using Amazon’s offering. If Rackspace can learn from Amazon’s missteps they should be able to provide a compelling cloud computing platform.

It has taken some time for a strong, low-level “Infrastructure as a Service” competitor to EC2 to arrive, but we may finally have it in Cloud Servers. I hope so, because the more active competition we have in this space the more quickly the products and technology will improve, and the better off we cloud computing users will be.

Google’s Gmail and Google Apps are no longer BETA products.

I guess that means that not only has the designation “beta” been stripped of any real meaning on the modern web, but even the decision to leave beta status can be taken on a whim. Perhaps there is a tangible reason — aside from marketing towards the big end of town — that prompted Google to remove the beta status from their products today. Perhaps. But if so, the reason isn’t explained in these blog posts.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a long-time user of both of these products and I consider them invaluable tools of very high quality. The tech is great. I just get annoyed when large companies, through carelessness or malice, misuse words and destroy their semantic value.

Amazon’s AWS Management Console now supports the company’s CloudFront service, a CDN-like extension for the Simple Storage Service (S3).

You can read about this new feature on the AWS Blog and watch an introductory video here.