Where to host a dynamic website that stores all its content on Amazon S3? Anywhere you choose to.

OblakSoft is pleased to announce availability of an OVF Virtual Appliance with ready-to-run WordPress on S3: Yapixx.  Now WordPress on S3 can run anywhere, not just in Amazon EC2.

Any web server

The virtual appliance is distributed in the Open Virtualization Format that is supported by most major hypervisor software vendors (such as VMware, VirtualBox, Oracle VM, etc.).  The virtual appliance (one-file OVA package) contains the same software components as the corresponding Yapixx Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

The Yapixx VM has the …

WordPress on S3: no more backups

How much trouble will it be if your webserver failed?  No trouble at all, if your website keeps its content on reliable Amazon S3 storage.

There are a lot of nuances in ensuring proper backups and restores of websites. When was the last backup taken? How much data might have been lost? How long will it take to recover it? When was the last time you tested restore? Do you even have an offsite backup?

Now that you can run dynamic websites off Amazon S3 storage, we’ll demonstrate why you no longer need to worry about backing up and restoring your website data. Losing the webserver is no longer a disaster. Cloud storage offers almost unsurpassable reliability a lot of website owners (small & large) would benefit from. In a way you get an "instantaneous backup" to the cloud. …

My first computer program was written almost quarter a century ago on a BK-0010 computer.  It was very simple: the program asked the user to enter their name and then greeted the user using the entered name, like “Hello, Artem!”.  I was fascinated.  A couple of lines written in Vilnius BASIC transformed a piece of metal and silicon into a considerate thing that cared about a person’s name enough to remember it :-).  Of course, the first experience doesn’t represent the day-to-day routine of software development, but the moments when I see a couple of lines making an amazing transformation still enchant me, and remind me why I’ve been writing code all this time.

I’ve just experienced this very same first-time feeling as we’ve released …

WordPress on S3: run a beautiful website on Amazon S3 cloud storage

OblakSoft is proud to introduce the 1st ever dynamic WordPress site running on top of Amazon S3: Yapixx.  Now you too can launch your own beautiful website on Amazon S3.

While Yapixx stands for Yet Another Picture Sharing Site, it is actually one of a kind.  Yapixx is WordPress that was moved to run on top of Amazon S3 storage without changing a line of code in the WordPress core engine.

• What is Yapixx?
• …

OblakSoft is pleased to showcase how simple it is to run LAMP applications on the cloud storage.  OblakSoft configured the WordPress web publishing platform to run on Amazon S3 storage and made the recipe available for anyone to replicate.  A ready-to-run WordPress site (configured as Yapixx) – is available for public use for FREE.  Yapixx is WordPress configured as a picture sharing website that runs on top of Amazon S3 (Yapixx stands for Yet Another Picture Sharing Site).

…

Version 2 of the PBMS daemon is now ready.

Here are the major changes introduced with this version:

• PBMS is fully integrated with MySQL 5.5:
  PBMS is now provided as a patch for MySQL 5.5 which simplifies installation and provides numerous benefits.
  
  
  • All engines are "PBMS enabled":
    PBMS no longer requires that you have a "PBMS enabled" storage engine to be able to use PBMS.
    
    
  • The MySQL client lib provides the PBMS client API:
    You no longer need to link your application to a separate PBMS lib to use the PBMS 'C' API.
    
    
  • mysqldump understands PBMS BLOB URLS:
    When dumping tables or databases containing PBMS BLOB URLs mysqldump will dump the referenced BLOBs as binary data to a …

We use nginx and its features a lot in Scribd. Many times in the last year we needed some pretty interesting, but not supported feature – we wanted nginx X-Accel-Redirect functionality to work with remote URLs. Out of the box nginx supports this functionality for local URIs only. In this short post I want to explain how did we make nginx serve remote content via X-Accel-Redirect.

First of all, here is why you may need this feature. Let’s imagine you have a file storage on Amazon S3 where you store tons of content. And you have an application where you have some content downloading functionality that you want to be available for logged-in/paying/premium users and/or you want to keep track of downloads your users perform …

Hi,

Support for S3 BLOB storage has now been fully integrated into the PBMS engine. It works in much the same way that I mentioned in an earlier post but with some important changes so I will explain it all again here.

When using S3 BLOB storage with PBMS the BLOB reference tracking and metadata is handled the same as before in that they are stored in the BLOB record in the repository, but the actual BLOB is stored on an S3 server.

To setup S3 storage you need to add an S3 cloud reference record to the pbms.pbms_cloud table provided by PBMS. For example:

INSERT INTO pbms.pbms_cloud(ID, Server, bucket, PublicKey, PrivateKey) VALUES(16, "S3.amazonaws.com", "PBMS-Test", "abc123", "amjr15vWq");

Then you need to tell PBMS which database should use S3 cloud storage for its BLOBs. This is done by updating a couple of records in the pbms_variable table that PBMS provides for each …

EC2 is nifty, but it doesn’t appear suitable for all needs, and that’s what this post is about.

For instance, a machine can just “disappear”. You can set things up to automatically start a new instance to replace it, but if you just committed a transaction it’s likely to be lost: MySQL replication is asynchronous, EBS which is slower if you commit your transactions on it, or EBS snapshots which are only periodic (you’d have to add foo on the application end). This adds complexity, and thus the question arises whether EC2 is the best solution for systems where this is a concern.

When pondering this, there are two important factors to consider: a database server needs cores, RAM and reasonably low-latency disk access, and application servers should be near their database server. This means you shouldn’t split app and db servers to different hosting/cloud providers.

We’d like to hear your thoughts on EC2 …

Sun's Open Cloud Vision unveilled: Open Cloud Platform, an open infrastructure powered by Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris, and Open Storage software technologies.  Open APIs, Open formats and Open source.

On March 18th, at CommunityONE aka CloudONE, Sun unveiled the open cloud platform for powering public and private clouds. We also  announced that we are building our own Public Cloud. This will include a Storage and Compute Cloud. Our Cloud will be compatible with Amazon S3 and EC2 at the API level. Meaning, we will provide S3 and EC2 compatibility APIs in addition to our own, hence enabling an easy migration from Amazon services to Sun Cloud. All clouds - public, private or hybrid, built on Sun's Open Cloud platform will be interoperable and there will be minimal vendor lockin given the cloud platform will be built on open …