Austin on Rails meeting

Last night I went to the Austin on Rails meeting just for fun (I know, “Dude, you really need to get a life”). Man, this is where all the real nerds are: all hairy, poorly dressed, probably haven’t seen the sun in 3+ weeks, and all crazy smart. There was a lot of love in that room for people with poor grooming and few social skills.

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.

Anyhoo, if none of this sounds remotely interesting, and you can actually get a date, you are to be congratulated: I commend you. However if, like me, you have no social life, these guys could be a pretty good support group: http://www.austinonrails.org/.