Catching Up

Time for one of my cleanup the inbox posts! I've been in the office all week, but I've been unbelievably busy while planning for my February trips to Utah, Vancouver BC, and London.

Here are some of the cool things I've seen lately:

• Baseline Magazine has a really interesting article, Inside MySpace.com. In the article most easily read in the print form), you can learn about how the folks at MySpace went from handling a system with 500,000 user accounts to over 140 million accounts in less than two years. Judging from the amount of time my three teenagers spend on that site, its no wonder that scalability was a big challenge for them.
  
  There's nothing specific to any particular Amazon Web Service in the article, but I do believe that some lucky EC2-powered startup will find themselves in this enviable situation before too long. As you read the article, you will learn that scalability is a lot more than simply adding more hardware.
• On the topic of EC2, I follow a couple of blogs which cover the topic of hardware virtualization. You might enjoy reading the X86 Virtualization Blog and the VM Blog.
• Alex Iskold wrote about The New Face of Amazon: Tags, Ajax, Plogs & Wikis. If you are building an Ajax-style application you might enjoy the Ajax Cookbook.
• Amazon's Jinesh Varia attended and spoke at Mashup Camp last week. The Zontube application was demo'ed there, and lots of people seem to be excited about it.
• Developer Justin Mason gave a talk about EC2 and S3 and posted his slides. Dan Creswell talked about S3, and also posted his presentation.
• The Wiibadge site stores its badges in S3. I don't own a Wii, so I don't know exactly how it works.
• We recently published a Webmail.us success story.

That's about all I have today.

-- Jeff;