Amazon Announces…something
This morning, Amazon Web Services announced a new content delivery service, but hasn’t given much in the way of specifics, costs or details.
It’s interesting they’d create a content delivery network since that’s what many people, myself included, are using S3 for. Perhaps this network will have less latency and better response times then S3 sometimes has.
In an email sent to customers, Amazon writes:
You’ll start by storing the original version of your objects in Amazon S3, making sure they are publicly readable. Then, you’ll make a simple API call to register your bucket with the new content delivery service. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content. It’s that simple.
From the email, the new content delivery service sounds separate from S3. Here’s what we do know.
1. There are no minimum fees and no commitments to use the new content delivery service. You will only pay for what you actually use.
2. A single, simple API call is all that is needed to get started delivering your content.
3. Works seamlessly with Amazon S3 – this gives you durable storage for the original, definitive versions of your files while making the content delivery service easier to use.
If the only difference between this CDN and S3 is a slight increase in performance at an additional cost, I don’t see why I should stop using regular old S3 as a delivery tool. How about a little more direction, Amazon.
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Help Me, Feedburner, You’re My Only Hope
One of the first blog posts I wrote here was about how much I love Feedburner. Feedburner is so good at handling all the RSS feeds at my college, and I don’t have to worry about it.
One of Feedburner’s best features is it’s email subscriptions services. It handles user subscriptions, unsubscribe requests and lets you customize the look of the emails that get sent out. Basically, it’s the perfect RSS to Email platform. Set it and forget it. Each day, it dutifully sends out an email with my RSS headlines to on and off-campus users. It’s so great I want to use it send our intranet headlines to everyone on my campus. I’ve got the OK from administration and I want to get this project done.
So I started researching if Feedburner would let me import email addresses for my campus users. For a bit of time, Feedburner would allow you send a file to them and they would import email addresses for you. It’s a bit more work then just letting people do it themselves, but I can imagine that would lead to a spam avalanche for Feedburner. So, they stopped accepting email list imports.
During that time, they got acquired by Google. I’m sure they enjoyed a nice payday and the reliability of Google’s architecture, but the downside is that innovation and development on new features has pretty much dried up, similar to Google’s many other acquisitions (Grand Central, DodgeBall, Jaiku, etc.) The email list import is the biggest request by users on the support forums, and the answer seems to vary between “soon” to “sometime this month” to “never.”
I want to use Feedburner to send my emails. I’ve tried other services like Feedblitz and the emails lack the elegance of Feedburner. No offense, FeedBlitz, but setting up an account in your system was a hassle and the customization options were confusing. Feedburner is 10x more simple. Look at these emails and tell me which one looks more elegant and easier to read and understand.
Feedburner:
An email from Feedburner.
FeedBlitz:
An email from Feedblitz
Help me, Feedburner. Please, I beg you, let me import my users into your system. I will pay you for this functionality. I don’t have the time to spend trying to figure out how to make FeedBlitz look presentable. If anyone at Feedburner reads this, please email me.
Does anyone else out there have suggestions of services to check out, seeing as how FB will probably not get back to me? Thank you in advance.
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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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