EC2 gets more rational, EC2-based rivers
I’m a big fan of Amazon’s web services, especially EC2. So many cool things about it, but perhaps the coolest is that I get to create my own version of Windows and offer it to others. How they got Microsoft to go along with this, I don’t know, but it’s great.
Last night Amazon announced a new feature for EC2 that’s hard to explain, largely because it makes EC2 work the way you always thought it should. Even so, it’s an important development, so it’s worth trying to explain, by analogy…
Suppose you went to Fry’s or Best Buy and bought a new laptop. You brought it home, set it up, installed all the software, Firefox, WinZip, Dropbox, etc, tweaked up the settings so it works the way you like it. This could take a couple of hours, but you do it once and that’s it. However, imagine if you had to do this every time you booted the system.
If it worked this way, you’d probably put all the custom stuff on an external drive, to keep the amount of work you have to do each time you reboot to a minimum. And you’d avoid rebooting at all costs.
What Amazon did this morning was eliminate the difference between the external drive and the boot drive. So now you can get your (virtual) computer set up the way you want it, stop it, and only restart it when you need it running. When it’s not running you don’t pay the CPU rates.
They also made starting much faster than launching the old style instances.
I put all this new stuff through its paces this morning and it worked as advertised. As with all EC2 services, the docs make it sound stranger that it really is. They invent all these weird terms that don’t help you understand what’s going on. But now that we know this, they’re not so intimidating, and the tutorials they provide work well, as does the service.
Coming soon: EC2-based rivers!
The timing of this release is very good for my work. I’ve been preparing a new version of River2 that allows users to create EC2-based rivers.
As with EC2 for Poets, it’s something a technical end-user can set up in a few minutes. And because of the way the new instances work, you won’t have to leave your river running all the time, you’ll be able to start and stop it whenever you like.
What does this mean? Well, previously the benefits of realtime RSS were only available to the few people who could setup and run servers. By offering an easy-to-launch EC2-based river, the number of people who can do this will shoot up by a huge factor. As I said, Amazon’s timing is very good.
After getting this release done, the next step is to make the EC2-based river multi-user so one instance can serve dozens of users. I think we’ll reach this milestone before the end of the year. Knock wood! 
Eventually, when all this is done, we’ll have a loosely-coupled realtime network running completely outside the confines of any single company, all based on an open format and protocol, RSS and rssCloud.
Bing!
