post past :: james murty

Amazon has announced the availability of two new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types with increased CPU processing power, bringing the total number of instance types to five.

The new instances are termed “High-CPU” versions, and they have a focus on raw processing power as measured in EC2 Compute Units (ECUs). The following table puts the new c1.medium and c1.xlarge instances in perspective:

For a more detailed overview of the instance types available in EC2, see the Instance Types section in the service’s API documentation.

I have added an article about my PAWS Marketplace example application to the AWS resources site: PAWS Marketplace - A Rails Marketplace Application in the Cloud.

The PAWS Marketplace is a proof-of-concept Ruby on Rails web application that runs entirely on Amazon Web Services. The application’s web site allows anyone with an Amazon Payments account to buy or sell digital products, while the marketplace’s owner earns commissions for the sales it performs. In addition to serving as an example marketplace implementation, this application is interesting because it uses the SimpleDB service to store its data instead of a traditional relational database.

The article describes how to install and run the marketplace web site yourself. It also includes links to the example code, and to a screencast video that demonstrates how to configure and use the marketplace web site.

If you need to compile or run Java programs from the command line, it can be a real hassle to identify all the jar libraries the program requires and include them in your classpath.

Here is a short script that will do this work for you on Unix, Linux or Mac systems. It finds all the jar files in the current directory or its subdirectories, and merges the list into a classpath string delimited by colon (:) characters.

export CP=`find . -name '*.jar' | tr "\n" :`

You can then run your program like so:

java -classpath $CP MyProgram

Amazon has announced beta support for the Copy Object operation in S3. This feature was pre-announced in March.

The copy functionality allows you to copy objects within or between your S3 buckets, and optionally to replace the metadata associated with the object in the process. The single new operation makes it possible to copy, move, and rename your S3 objects, and you can even update an object’s metadata by copying the object in-place.
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I have added an article about the S3 service’s POST upload feature to the AWS resources site: Browser Uploads to S3 using HTML POST Forms.

The article describes how to create HTML POST forms that allow your web site visitors to upload files into your S3 account using a standard web browser.

Amazon has released an updated version of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) API with the version name 2008-02-01. This release includes a number of new features that were not available in the 2007-08-29 version of the API that I discussed in the book Programming Amazon Web Services (PAWS). To help keep my readers up-to-date with the capabilities of the EC2 service, this article contains a description of the new features and demonstrates how to use them in code.

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