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Posted on November 20 , 2011 In Uncategorized

Recent AWS News

Posted on November 6 , 2011 In Uncategorized

Recent AWS News

 

 

 

Posted on October 16 , 2011 In Uncategorized

Recent AWS News

 

Posted on October 10 , 2011 In Uncategorized

Recent AWS News

Posted on October 2 , 2011 In Recent News

Recent AWS News

Posted on October 26 , 2010 In CloudFront

Get a Grip on CloudFront Private Streaming

AWSNinja Code Library

Name: awsninja_cloudfrontprivatestreaming

AWS Services: CloudFront, S3

Source: at GitHub

In a Sentence: Setting up Private Streaming on CloudFront is hard, so I automated it.

Setting up private streaming on CloudFront is way more difficult that it probably needs to be. There are all sorts of little niggling details that will have you pulling your hair out. My hope is that this post will help ease the pain, by gliding you right past the rough edges so you can get it done and maintain your sanity.

To do that, this tutorial will set up a CloudFront Streaming Distribution, set up the security, upload some videos, and set up a webpage to view those videos using private streaming.  In addition to the AWS Ninja code that I’ve written, the package includes the JW Player and the AWS SDK for PHP, both of which are included consistent with the licenses granted by those works.

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AWSNinja Code Library

Name: awsninja_cloudfrontjavascript

AWS Services: CloudFront, S3

Source: at GitHub

In a Sentence: A system for optimal JavaScript management and performance in both production and development environments.

Today I’m going to try to answer the question: JavaScript – How do you organize this mess?!? The StackOverflow user who posted this question was primarily concerned with organizing JavaScript classes and namespaces – but many of the replies were about managing and serving script files. Both topics are extremely important, and in this post I’ll be focusing on the latter.

I’ve previously written about managing your site’s images on CloudFront, and this article will basically tackle the same topic for JavaScript. Someday, I will post a third post in this series that deals with CSS.

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AWSNinja Code Library

Name: awsninja_ec2resourcemanagement

AWS Services: EC2

Source: at GitHub

In a Sentence: A script framework for automating operations on EC2 resources

When I first moved beyond simply playing around with EC2 and made the decision that I was actually going to build and deploy a web application on it, I quickly discovered that it’s next to impossible to keep everything straight.

The reason for this is the heart of the difference between using actual computer hardware and using virtualization. Virtualization is more flexible because it has more parts. That’s also the reason why it is more complicated.

With traditional hosting, you (or your hosting provider) build a server to a specification. This involves capital investment because you have to purchase the hardware and locate it somewhere. Once you’ve bought the hardware, you are stuck with it. Changes to your configuration require new capital investment and may result in unwanted legacy components in your possession. This costs time and money.

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Posted on July 20 , 2010 In CloudWatch

CloudWatch as an Ad-Hoc Debugging Tool

This post is not going to be long-winded dissertation on how CloudWatch can help you with debugging your applications.  It is just a quick description of a recent experience I had.

I recently had an issue on DocMonk when the script that sends out the emails to the PDF recipients was crashing.  After checking it out, I discovered that the crashes coincided with the startup of another script which handles backend aggregating for the reporting pages.  I was initially skeptical that this other script could really be causing such a problem.  I decided to try to see what else was going on on the server.  I started CloudWatch Monitoring on the server and went away for a few hours.

When I came back, this is what the CPU Utilization Chart looked like:
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AWSNinja Code Library

Name: awsninja_simpledbadmin

AWS Services: SimpleDB

Source: at GitHub

In a Sentence: A web interface for Amazon SimpleDB.

SimpleDBAdmin is an administration tool for Amazon SimpleDB.   If you don’t know what SimpleDB is here’s the first paragraph from Amazon’s SimpleDB site:

Amazon SimpleDB is a highly available, scalable, and flexible non-relational data store that offloads the work of database administration. Developers simply store and query data items via web services requests, and Amazon SimpleDB does the rest.

Why SimpleDBAdmin is Needed

I started building SimpleDBAdmin because I wanted a package to administer my SimpleDB data that met the following criteria:
  • Web-based - so it could be used by anybody anywhere
  • Free – for obvious reaons
  • Intuitive to use

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