Will Beattie's Blog

I have just published a small project on CodePlex called CDN Sync . The primary goal of this project is to provide a set of tools to synchronize local files and folders with Cloud Storage Providers during the Build and Deployment process. Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for all your static website files should be the default these days if you’re concerned providing the optimal client experience, however deploying these files to your CDN Provider can be a manual process and prone to versioning issues. Version 1.0 includes an MSBuild task and support for synchronizing with Amazon S3 . Pre-Requisites: Visual Studio 2010 Amazon Web Services Account You can download the Release from here and read the documentation Future features: Support for Cloud Files Support for Windows Azure Command Line Interface Any questions or issues then please post them to the CodePlex project or comment here.

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...

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.