If you’ve been following my tweets you might have noticed that I’ve been running around Python and Django and Google App Engine for the last few weeks. Honestly, I fell in love with Python the second I wrote my first few lines of code, but it is not what this post is about. This post is about my short experience with App Engine. My first experience with App Engine was back in 2009...
Amazon Web Services: Cloud Computing Free of Charge
Howly shmoly, just read the announcement of Amazon’s Free Usage Tier offering an EC2 micro instance free of charge for a whole year! Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Well let’s go back a few months and analyze the reason why I left Amazon in favor of Media Temple’s (ve) service: Amazon is way too expensive for a young geek like me, barely having the money to pay rent for my lousy...
Moving Away from the Amazon Cloud
I wrote quite a few posts about Amazon Web Services and I hosted my blog there too for a while, but after some time I decided to switch back to a cheaper hosting provider and leave Amazon for the big projects inside our company. This turned out to be quite tricky. Moving away from the Amazon cloud has some pitfalls you should watch out for. So this post is not only a note to myself about how to...
Driving the (ve) Server at Media Temple
It’s been a few weeks now since Media Temple launched their new (ve) Server and I’ve been testing it out for a few days now. I’m actually hosting my blog there to experience some real traffic load and my first impressions are awesome! I started off with the simplest 512 MB server and transferred a few websites to the new platform. I’m not too used to the Ubuntu Linux...
Amazon Web Services: EC2 in North California
January is going crazy for me down here in Moscow, lot’s of stuff happening, loads of work. No time to tweet, not time to blog. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I quit my job at GSL and now working at a new local startup. I’ll make sure to announce it as soon as the website is alright, so stay tuned ;) Anyways, as I wrote back in December, I’m moving all my stuff to the new...
Amazon Web Services: Moving to a New Region
I wrote about Optimizing Your Amazon Web Services Costs back in November, where I mentioned some of the upsides of Reserved Instances at Amazon, but haven’t mentioned any downsides, and here we are. Two weeks later Amazon announced the Northern California Region opening. I thought it wouldn’t differ from the Virginia data center, but still decided to give it a shot for a few hours. I...
Cloud Tips: Amazon EC2 & Rejected Email
A few weeks ago I’ve setup my email in the /etc/aliases for user root (and the others) and started to actually read my root email from time to time (I wonder why I never did that before). Anyways, what bugged me straight away is that I had some rejected emails that were not being delivered, yielding the following errors (I removed some numbers): Deferred: 450 4.7.1 : Helo command rejected:...
Optimizing Your Amazon Web Services Costs
I’ve been with Amazon for quite a long time now and you must have heard that their web hosting services aren’t very cheap. The average total of one instance per month (including EBS, S3 and all the others) was around $120 at the start. That was back in July 2009 when I had no idea about how all this stuff works. With a lot of experimenting I managed to drop my instance per month costs...
Cloud Tips: Rediscovering Amazon CloudFront
So, three months later I realized I wasn’t using CloudFront at all! Huh? I took a deeper look at my Amazon Web Services bill last month and found out that I wasn’t even charged for CloudFront! But hey, I delivered all my static content through CloudFront distributions from S3 and I had a subdomain mapped to those distributions and everything was working fine (thought I).. Let’s...
Cloud Tips: Automatic Backups to S3
In a previous post about backing up EC2 MySQL to an Amazon S3 bucket we covered dumping MySQL datasets, compressing them and uploading to S3. After a few weeks test-driving the shell script, I came up with a new version that checks, fixes and optimizes all tables before generating the dump. This is pretty important as mysqldump will fail on whatever step would cause an error (data corruption...