New job and learning AWS in support of distributed computing. I’ve done a good bit of research to understand the ecology of web services. They can be expensive but when you count total costs, they come out pretty close to break-even. You can lease computational power for relatively short periods to do quick work, then give the hardware back and stop paying for it. That is a powerful shift in technology.
OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus and a couple others where in the running while doing the evaluations. Each had their advantages which I’ll probably write about later.
I settled on implementing a Eucalyptus system using spare hardware. So far I’ve got a working and running system built from the source code. It provides a subset of the AWS services on local hardware for testing. The S3 support isn’t quite there as of version 3.3.0 but it might improve in the next couple of months. S3 is simple storage interface allowing for storing information by a key value. Their EC2 support appears to be much better and allows for quickly building virtual machines with pre-configured operating systems.
In the background, I’m writing Java code to implement AWS tools and services. I forgot how much fun Java can be.