Amazon Web Services

[Mark MacLennan]

Here's some information on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for hosting and processing:

       http://aws.amazon.com/ec2
       http://aws.amazon.com/s3

Mike Culver, an Amazon Web Evangelist, was at the University of Minnesota
this past September 5 and gave a presentation about Amazon Web Services
to the Twin Cities Linux Users group (TCLUG).

Apparently he is going to be in town again the last week of April in 2008
to give presentations to some other local users groups. 

http://evangelists.wetpaint.com/page/Mike+Culver+Minnesota+April+2008


Redhat has recently announced formal support for Amazon Web Service ("Cloud
Computing"):
http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/

The use of Amazon web services have been mentioned in a couple of
the Geo web blogs:

http://cholmes.wordpress.com/2006/10/29/i-take-your-s3-and-raise-you-an-ec2/
http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2007/06/29/how-can-i-compete-against-google/
http://ambergis.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/amazon-as-infrastructure-for-opengeo-data/
http://ambergis.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/more-gis-in-the-cloud/


The only reference I have seen so far to an existing GIS application using
Amazon's Web Services is:

http://www.weogeo.com 
http://weoceo.weogeo.com
http://www.blinkgeo.com/2007/10/an-interview-with-a-geospatial-startup-weogeo/

I have not used any of these Amazon services yet but I am looking into using
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for some basic external backups as
described here:
http://www.nateirwin.net/CategoryView,category,Utilities.aspx
http://robrohan.com/2007/11/03/server-backup-with-amazon-s3-howto/

- Mark