Published on
January 6, 2010 in
AWS.
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Amazon recently published a page titled AWS Solutions Pages:
We’ve just put a number of AWS Solution pages on line to provide more information about some of the more popular ways that our customers put AWS to use.
Here’s what we have:
Each page identifies the challenges inherent in the use case, highlights the ways that AWS can be put to use, identifies the benefits of using AWS, and links to appropriate resources.
About a month ago Amazon announced that Amazon EC2 Instances Now Can Boot from Amazon EBS, so you’re not forced to store images on S3, and boot directly from EBS, gaining faster boot time, persistent OS, and other goodies.
A good comparison of running instances from S3 vs. EBS can be found here:
Amazon EC2 Concepts » AMI and Instance Concepts » AMIs
| Root Device |
Instance Store |
Amazon EBS |
| Boot Time |
Usually Less than 5 minutes |
Usually Less than 1 minute |
| Size Limit |
10 GiB |
1 TiB |
| Location |
Instance storage |
Amazon EBS volume |
| Data Persistence |
Data persists for the life of the instance; non-root devices can use Amazon EBS |
Data persists on instance failure and can persist on instance termination |
| Upgrading |
Instance attributes are fixed for the life of an instance |
The kernel, instance type, and ramdisk can be changed while the instance is stopped. |
| Charges |
Instance usage and AMI storage |
Instance usage, Amazon EBS volume usage, and AMI Storage |
| AMI Creation |
Requires installation and use of AMI tools |
Uses a single command/call |
| Stopped State |
Cannot be in stopped state; instances are running or not |
Can be placed in stopped state where instance is not running, but state is maintained in Amazon EBS |
Z.
Published on
December 24, 2009 in
General.
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Today I spent some time to catch up with recent news. Here is some of the good stuff:
- Sending SMS from GMail -(See SMS Chat supported providers)
- Azure Storage Options
- Microsoft Codename Dallas – Microsoft’s Information Service. Good introduction here.
- James Hamilton covers some new stuff at AWS (Amazon Web Services) including:
- Elastic Cloud Compute Spot Instance (cool stuff! – bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity)
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Unlimited Beta
- Amazon CloudFront Streaming
Some interesting security news (SecurityFocus et al.):
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Just read an interesting Slashdot article – “Firefox 3.5 Now the Most Popular Browser Worldwide.”
gQuigs notes a graph up at StatCounter Global Statistics, which shows that in the last few days Firefox 3.5 became the most used browser version worldwide, edging ahead of IE7.IE8 is rising fast (along with Windows 7), but over the last few months the slope of Firefox’s worldwide curve has been steeper. (In the US, IE8 has always been ahead of Firefox 3.5; in Europe Firefox has led since late summer.) The submitter suggests using the time when Firefox rules the roost, globally speaking, to put the final nail in the coffin of IE6, which still has a 14% global share (5%-7% in the US and EU; China and Korea are holding up IE6’s numbers).
Now, before we get too excited about that as some of the commentators note, IE (all versions) > Firefox (all versions) with 55% to 32%, respectively, as we see in the following graph.
and summarized in the following comment:
dido (9125) The real story here is in the trends of each version. IE7 and IE6 are in decline. For Internet Explorer, only IE8 is still growing, but its rate of growth is significantly slower than Firefox’s. The headline may be misleading, but the the summary is right on the money. If these trends keep up, the headline may well become true a lot sooner than you seem to think.
Meanwhile, firefox 3.5 claims to bring significant speed improvements, which is always good!
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Another interesting post from googleblog which highlights some activities and interesting statistics:
2009/12/18:
- 20% of Google search queries are ones we haven’t seen in the past 90 days, and there are well over 300 billion web pages to crawl
- Akamai published a study which found that Internet users in 2009 expect web pages to load twice as fast as they did in 2006
- Research firm Tubemogul found that more than 81 percent of all online video viewers click away if they encounter a video that’s rebuffering
- But it’s not just about actual latency — it’s also about perceived latency — Although Google News takes about 8 seconds to fully load due to the richness of the page, the results you first see above the fold are there nearly instantly, thus altering that perception of latency
- Also mentioned is a recently published Akamai study – September 14, 2009 – Akamai Reveals 2 Seconds as the New Threshold of Acceptability for eCommerce Web Page Response Times
And more links!
http://code.google.com/speed/
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/
http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper
Published on
December 14, 2009 in
Chrome and tips.
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Here are some Chrome tips:
- Chrome Keyboard and mouse shortcuts
- CTRL+SHIFT+T - Reopens the last tab you’ve closed. Google Chrome remembers the last 10 tabs you’ve closed. This is extremely useful if you accidentally closed your browsers with multiple opened tabs (Chrome doesn’t warn about this yet :/)
- SHIFT+ESC, about:memory – shows some geek stuff and statistics
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