Darren New wrote:

>> Interesting. It appears from the documentation that the contents of a 
>> bucket cannot be hierachical...
> 
> URLs aren't either. Put a slash in the name of the file you store in the 
> bucket.
> 
> It's a bit more complicated, really.

You're allowed to have special characters in object names?

>> I have a blog, but I'm not very happy with it. I'd like to write my 
>> own blog engine and run that. (In Haskell, naturally.)
> 
> So you're talking about the form that takes comments?

Yes. But also the interface that allows me, the blog owner, to add new 
blog entries without logging into the virtual server over SSH and 
manually editing half a dozen HTML pages. (And, ideally, convert my 
custom markup into valid HTML.)

> Certainly renting is more expensive in the long run than buying. But 
> that's why it's the *elastic* compute cloud, you see.

Uh... no, I don't really see.

Unless you mean that ranting 20 quad-core virtual machines for a day is 
cheaper than *buying* a renderfarm?

>>> Not sure what the virtualdub part involves
>> Transforming 6,000 frames into a single AVI so I can download it.
> 
> Ah, something you can script, then?

Indeed.

>> What, and be charged for 7 hours of computer time when the instance 
>> has finished rendering and is just sitting there waiting for me to 
>> tell it to transcode the video? :-P
> 
> You realize that 7 hours of compute time translates to less than a 
> dollar, right? Even if you let it go that long without checking, and 
> didn't bother to set it up to send you an email when it finished?

Right. Because sending an email is way easier than scripting VirtualDub. 
Oh, wait - no it isn't. :-P

>> I guess the fun part is if an instance "fails" during a render. 
>> Apparently it can do that. No refunds...
> 
> I've been running one for a company for something like 2 years.

Running what? An EC2 instance?

Perhaps you can answer a small question for me then: It seems simple 
enough how a random dude like me can sign up and start using AWS. But 
what if you're trying to use it for commercial purposes? How does giving 
multiple administrators control over the system work?

> I've never had the machine crash.
> 
> I think it's far more CYA - "don't run your database on a machine that 
> might crash and never make backups then blame us" - than any expectation 
> that any given machine will fail at any particular time.

Mmm, OK.

Of course, you get charged money for performing backups. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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