Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge
Amazon is running their second Start Up Challenge - I entered last year with my brilliant idea for a web service that would allow schools to quickly setup and scale emergency websites using Amazon S3 and EC2. I think it was a bit too niche-y, but I did get $25 in AWS credits, so that’s been a nice pile of money to play with and learn more about the system.
Basically - if you have an idea or are building a service that uses any of Amazon’s web services, you can enter their start-up challenge and if you make it all the way to the end, you can win $100,000, half in cash, half in credits - as well as a potential investment offer from Amazon.
You can learn more at their site - but get moving, the deadline for entries is October 3.
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Nice EC2 Tutorial
Here’s a quick and easy Amazon EC2 tutorial. It shows you just how quickly you can go from zero to a running server in just five minutes.
I’m not crazy about that background music, but it’s a good video. They are using the Elasticfox Firefox extension to manage their instances.
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Cloud Servers are easy with Jollat
One of the things I’ve found about EC2 is that while it’s very powerful, managing servers and processes from the command line can be intimidating, and raises the barrier of entry into this exciting world. There are services like RightScale, but those services, while more user-friendly, can be expensive1 for the institution that wants to learn more about cloud servers and how to manage them.
Jollat is a new cross-platform management tool for Amazon EC2 and S3. You can turn on, manage and turn off server instances easily. You can also create storage buckets in the US or EU and easily manage them.
Here’s a quick video:
You can use Jollat free for 30 days, and it’s only $66 to purchase a license. I think it’s that’s a great price if you want to use EC2 sparingly for projects on your campus.
1 - RightScale offers a free developer account that you can use to create and manage servers, but you don’t get the entire feature set unless you subscribe to their services.
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