Cool stuff though. There was a guy there from Amazon presenting AWS, particularly their “infrastructure as a service” stuff. Talked a bit about their Simple Storage Service, which is flexible storage you can access via a webservice priced under a scaled fee-per-use model, as opposed to a subscription for a big chunk of storage you may not ever use. He also quickly covered the Simple Queuing Service – the name says it all.
Then he went into the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud service (EC2), which is basically a huge grid of virtual Linux servers that can be spun up dynamically via a webservice, again with a fee-per-service pricing model. This offers a pretty cool solution for apps with limited needs for bursts of scalability, as well as time-bound apps. You can set the servers to spin up on a particular schedule, or you can spin up new servers if your app’s performance characteristics pass some arbitrary threshold you specify. Some cool usages he mentioned were:
- A company in India is using EC2 to process payroll once a month for several thousand employees.
- Stanford Law School uses EC2 to process OCR transcription of millions of old legal documents.
- The guy who presented created a time-bound app called ThursDate – a social network that only operates between the hours of 5:00 – 8:00 on Thursday night. The idea is that you have three hours to log on, upload pictures, videos, etc on Thursday night to find a date for Friday night. When the 3-hour session is over, everything disappears, and the app reappears anew next Thursday with no persisted info from the previous session. He has a chron job that spins up an EC2 image at the appropriate time, and the floodgates open.
