Wired explores the Cloud
There’s a great article in this month’s Wired magazine about cloud services and specifically about Amazon. They’ve just posted the online version, read it here.
Utility computing is Web 2.0’s version of rocket fuel. “You don’t generate your own electricity,” Bezos says. “Why generate your own computing?” The forces driving online apps — Internet bandwidth and reliability — also mean that, in terms of data per dollar, servers in your closet or colocation facility can’t compete with industrial-scale bits piped in from hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.
The story is an interesting look at the how and why of Amazon’s offerings.
Recently Amazon announced that more bandwidth is being used by AWS then the amazon.com ecommerce site. Here’s a note from their last earnings release:
Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined.
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The Cloud Gets Cheaper
This morning, Amazon announced new pricing for it’s data transfer inside Amazon Web Services. This is great news if you’re using Simple Storage Service (S3) or EC2 to serve content, as I do.
Through the end of this month, the pricing for data out and in has been:
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.180 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB
Starting May 1, that will change to:
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB
Note: Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of the Amazon service. Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-US, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon SQS is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB). Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe will be charged at regular rates.
I don’t come anywhere near 10TB a month, so the pricing won’t affect me too terribly, but if you are pushing a ton of content out using S3, you should see significant savings. It’s interesting to watch these types of services come down in price. Soon, it will be a commodity.
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Preemptive Strikes Against Blog Spam
Blog spam is a pain. It wastes your time, your bandwidth and storage space. Kyle asked today on Twitter for some advice on how to reduce spam loads. Here are some plugins and code I’ve used to reduce spam on my blogs.
Akismet
This plug-in does a very nice job of marking spam and is set-it-and-forget-it easy. You’ll need a Wordpress API key and installation and setup is a snap. Akismet will quarantine comments and trackback pings in a special area so that you can either mass delete them or go through them and check for false positives. I’ve seen some false-positives on trackbacks. You can use Akismet with Wordpress as well as several other systems, including Movable Type.
Bad Behavior
A great way to stop bots from spamming you is to not even let them on your site. Bad Behavior does just that. If you don’t use Wordpress, you can still integrate the code with your PHP-based web app. I once got blocked from visiting a site by BB because I was using a Playstation3. I think BB didn’t like my user-agent.
ReCaptcha
ReCaptcha is a cool project out of CMU. I’ve been meaning to do a whole post on it, but I use it at my institution to reduce spam and it works great. Bad people stay out and as a byproduct, books are being digitized. You can learn more about there here. There is a Wordpress plugin as well, as well as resources for a large number of other content systems and programming languages.
Spam Firewall
One of the issues with Movable Type is that everything runs as a CGI process. This means if your blog or site runs MT, and you have open comments, your mt-comments.cgi script is going to be slammed. This means higher loads on your server, which in turn can lead to degraded performance, and worse, if your site is hosted in a shared environment, can get your blog turned off. My MT scripts are constantly getting killed at Dreamhost. Spam Firewall serves as a gate-keeper for your mt-comments.cgi script by trying to thwart off would-be intruders before they even get in. This plugin is only for PHP-based installs.
I hope this helps you reduce the spam on your blog.
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