Amazon Launches Web Services Console

I just received an email this morning from amazon announcing their new web-based console, which can be accessed at http://console.aws.amazon.com. My biggest concern around AWS has been the tooling. I've used the command line, and Chris Richardson had pointed me to an alternate set of tools by Tim Kay, but the problem for me was just how slow or cryptic the tools were to work with.

Amazon has been working on a new console, and I'm pretty impressed so far. You can create instances in seconds (sorry, credit card), launch 'quick starts' of various platforms, associate elastic IPs, etc... I am currently playing around with the Volumes, but can't figure out how to get them to mount inside of my instance (sure it's a newbie problem).

Looks like a good start, and really something that should drive more adoption of this platform.

Fall Forecast Panel Discussion Podcast Available

I've just released the Chariot Solutions Fall Forecast, Computing Among the Clouds Panel Discussion on the Tech Cast. Join me, Chris Cera, Chris Richardson, Kortina and Toby DiPasquale as we discuss Amazon, Google, and Cloud Computing in general.

Take a listen; the blog page is http://chariottechcast.libsyn.org/. The panel discussion is Episode 19 (click to download the MP3). You may subscribe to the RSS Feed here.

Enjoy!

Pages up on the Fall Forecast Conference

If you're interested in the 2008 Chariot Solutions Fall Forecast, Computing Among the Clouds Conference, you may view the website at www.cloudconeast.com or view my informative pages:

• My Fall Forecast Information Page


• The Fall Forecast Panel Discussion Summary Page - I'll update that after the show with questions/answers, key links, etc..

Cloud Computing Conference, October 17th

Chariot Solutions is sponsoring a conference on Cloud Computing on Friday, October 17th at the Penn State Great Valley campus.

We have some big names attending:

• Jeff Barr of Amazon.com speaking about Amazon's EC2 and S3 Cloud Computing platform


• Joe Gregorio and Johnathan Rochelle of Google, talking about Google App Engine and Google Spreadsheets


• Justin McCarthy and Britt Crawford of Cafe Press, the developers of HiveDB, a cloud-capable database platform


• Prasaad Chakka of Facebook, speaking about data warehousing in the cloud with Hive


• Chris Richardson, author of "POJOs in Action" and developer of CloudTools, a mechanism for deploying Java and Groovy applications in the cloud


• Ezra Zygmuntowicz of Engine Yard, a Rubyist, developer of MERB (a high performance alternative to Ruby on Rails) and author of Vertebra, a cloud computing platform

There are several more sessions, including an hour-long panel talk hosted by yours truly on using Amazon and other cloud platforms with local experts Toby DiPasquale, Chis Cera, and Andrew Kortina. We are also in talks with Microsoft about their attendance, and they would like to get the word out on their new Windows Cloud Computing platform. Stay tuned!

If you're interested, the web site is http://www.cloudconeast.com. I hope to see you there!