Will Beattie's Blog

Recently Amazon EC2 announced that they were going to support Windows Server 2008 instances. The experience with GoGrid has been rocky to say the least and most recently the MyGSI’s shortcomings confirmed that the service was not able to meet our applications requirements for using instances on demand. Which brings me to this post. After 14 months with GoGrid I have just recently completed a migration of all applications and databases to Amazon EC2 and thought I would outline the steps I took. Creating New Instances Before you start you will need to create your new instances in Amazon EC2. I have covered this previously in another post . When you set up the firewall it is important that you open Port 1433 for traffic coming from your previous web server in GoGrid. Or if you want you can even create a temporary VPN between your GoGrid web server and EC2 database server using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud . This is an important step in ensuring minimal downtime. At this...

Last week I deployed a pet project (pun intended) of mine Borrow a Pet to the RackspaceCloud Cloud Sites environment. So far I’m very pleased with the performance of the site, however I thought I would highlight a few areas you need to be aware of when developing/deploying .NET MVC apps to the Cloud Sites environment as their documentation right now is fairly light.   It should be said that the 24/7 Support team are fantastic, however I found myself having to use them a bit too often for my liking. The technologies/tools/components I used goes like this. .NET MVC for the Presentation Layer LINQ to Entities for the data layer SQL Server 2008 Database Third Party Google Maps Wrapper for GeoCoding Unity for the IoC Container   Medium Trust Believe it or not but in my eight or so years of .NET development I’ve never had to develop with Medium Trust in mind. Boy had I been spoilt. For more details on Medium Trust information go to the...

Well the wait is over Microsoft have finally announced the Pricing for Windows Azure , thanks Darko for letting me know. Full post here . All in all there are no surprises and the pricing is pretty much on a par with other Cloud Computing providers. Let’s do a quick pricing comparison.   Windows Azure Amazon EC2 GoGrid RackspaceCloud Cloud Sites From $100 / month Compute Cycles $0.12 $0.125 $0.19 inc 10,000 / month $0.01 Inbound Bandwidth $0.10 $0.10 FREE inc 500 GB / month $0.25 / GB Outbound Bandwidth $0.10 $0.17 $0.50 inc 500 GB / month $0.25 / GB Storage / GB $0.15 $0.10 $0.15 inc 50 GB / month $0.50 / GB CDN N/A $0.17 / GB N/A ...

I know it's been a long time between drinks. But I've finally found the time to post about my latest discoveries from the land of the Bleeding Edge. I'm currently rebuilding my PC with Windows 7 Release Candidate, more on that later and have some free time. So as you would know if you have read the rest of my blog I have settled for a hosting solution of this. Go Grid – App & DB Servers EC2 - Transcoding, File Processing Services S3 - Media Storage CloudFront – CDN As we near the release date for our product we have been doing substantial testing in the area of uploading from the Client directly to S3 using Flash and then performing Transcoding in EC2. Anyone who's tried to play with the S3 API knows that it is a beast to say the least, so I choose to use the very good wrapper from Affirma called ThreeSharp . If you're doing development in .NET with S3 then you would be mad not to use it. However I have come acro...

Great news for everyone using Amazon S3 for Content Delivery.  Amazon have just lauched CloudFront  which  " delivers your content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance." The 4 Locations are Hong Kong, Japan, Europe and the United States. This is really great news and was the missing piece to the puzzle given that most of my traffic is coming from the Asia-Pacific region.  Nirvanix  have been offering this for sometime now and was my first choice, but now the tables have turned.  The combination of Ec2 , S3  and now  CloudFront  make the Amazon Service Offering impossible to ignore.  Stay tuned for some initial tests on how CloudFront performs from the various locations.