We have long been fans of Amazon Web Services here. We used Simple Storage Service, a.k.a S3, since day one, to store your BlueMarks. Since SmartLinks are powered by BlueMarks we access S3 each time when we need to generate SmartLink shortcuts pane.
We are hoping that SmartLinks are going to get big. So we need to make sure we can scale when more links pop out there on the web. Last week worked on moving the links code to Elastic Compute Cloud, a.k.a EC2, and now Jeff has taken over this effort. What we are doing is getting our PHP code setup on EC2 sample box. To scale we will just roll out more boxes! What is also great is that there is no charge for using S3 from EC2, so we are going to save money on bandwidth - even better.
We will keep you posted on how it goes and let you know when we move to AWS completely. In the mean time if you like to read about how to get going with EC2 please read this excellent post by Beau Lebens from Feedblendr. And here is a book about Amazon Web Services if you like to learn even more: Mining Amazon Web Services: Building Applications with the Amazon API
- Alex
p.s. you can now see SmartLinks for each Amazon Web Service on the AWS web services blog. Now that brings it all full circle!
