ruby on rails, jruby, aws, ec2, exalead

The feature I've been waiting for on EC2 has arrived - persistent storage is now available on the public beta as per an email from the EC2 team:

We are pleased to announce the release of a significant new Amazon EC2 feature, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), which provides persistent storage for your Amazon EC2 instances. With Amazon EBS, storage volumes can be programmatically created, attached to Amazon EC2 instances, and if even more durability is desired, can be backed with a snapshot to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

At a high level the features include:

• Volumes from 1Gb to 1Tb
• Multiple volumes can be mounted from one AMI
• Implemented as block devices
• Live in an availability zone
• Automatically replicated within the availability zone
• Support snapshots
• Multiple volumes can be used and striped across to improve I/O
• $0.10/gb allocated per month and $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests
• Sample cost based on 100Gb storage and 100 I/O per second is $36/month

I'm going to get playing with it and it will be interesting to see how it performs and also compare it on the cost front to some of the options I outlined in a previous post - in the meantime you can read more on the Amazon Web Services site.

One of the projects we’re working on needs to be able to publish images to Flickr. Rather than re-invent the wheel a quick search on RubyForge and GitHub turned up a number existing Flickr libraries for Ruby. After considering future requirements, we decided to go with flickr_fu.

There was just one teeny tiny problem: uploads to Flickr within flickr_fu were broken, as we discovered when we looked at the comments in the Flickr::Uploader class:

# NOT WORKING ... FILE UPLOADS IN NET::HTTP IS TEH SUCK 

A fork, a clone and a few tweaks later and we’ve got uploads working. The changes are currently in our fork but I’ll also be submitting them upstream after a little more testing.

There are currently a couple of web-based surveys being carried out that you may want to take a look at. First up is the survey for people who make websites 2008 aimed at anyone involved in web development from designers to Ruby coders from the guys at A List Apart.

Nearly 33,000 people took part in 2007 and it will be interesting to see what has changed and what has remained the same in terms of salary, experience, education and working conditions over the last year.

The second comes from HAML creator Hampton Catlin in the form of the more Ruby-centric Hampton’s Ruby Survey 2008. At the time of writing over 900 people have responded, so if you haven’t already, now’s the time to get your entry in.

The survey covers Ruby and Javascript frameworks, testing, interpreters and in a bizarre twist ends with religious beliefs. It will certainly be interesting to discover if the Ruby community is big on new-age spirituality or is just a godless bunch of coders!