Amazon Hosting TIGER is nice, OpenStreetMap would be interesting

June 5, 2009 6 Comments

I’m sure most of you have seen the news of Amazon hosting TIGER shapefiles in S3 and now in EBS.  Sure I like TIGER being available for EC2 instances, but the real amazing stuff happens when you can work with OpenStreetMap XML data.  That mounted up to either FME Server or some great open source tools running on EC2 really would whole open worlds up.  TIGER is the low hanging fruit here, but OSM would be the icing.  My mouth waters thinking about what people could do with EC2 instances chomping on OSM data.  One could do the lifting yourself, but Amazon’s rates are lower than what it would cost to host it yourself and since you are already on AWS, the benefit would be huge.

The GeoBunny just wants to consume OSM data on AWS

Update: A couple people have asked, yes you need to have an EC2 instance to leverage the EBS TIGER data.

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Amazon brings Windows (and SQL Server) to the cloud

October 1, 2008 5 Comments

The Amazon Web Services Blog says that Amazon will be bringing Microsoft Windows to EC2 this fall.

The 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows Server will be available and will be able to use all existing EC2 features such as Elastic IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and the Elastic Block Store. You’ll be able to call any of the other Amazon Web Services from your application. You will, for example, be able to use the Amazon Simple Queue Service to glue cross-platform applications together.

This is on the heels of the Oracle/Amazon EC2 release from a couple weeks ago.  Now that the tools are here, we’ll have to see how well they are adopted by corporate IT administrators who aren’t always open to giving up control of their servers to others.

Mr. Gates saw the value of the cloud early on

Mr. Gates saw the value of the cloud early on

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Oracle enters the cloud (MySQL Enterprise too)

September 22, 2008 6 Comments

Oracle and Amazon today announced that Oracle would be offering some of their products inside Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

The Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager can now be licensed to run in the cloud on Amazon EC2. Customers can even use their existing software licenses with no additional license fees. 

While I see nothing specifically about Oracle Spatial, I assume is can be licensed as well on the cloud.  The benefit to everyone is outside of licensing costs, the ability to launch the Oracle AMIs on EC2 and be up and running in no time.  That plus the scaleability of EC2 (and thus Oracle) means that you don’t have to worry about hardware limitations with your applications.  RSP Architects uses SQL Server as our database of choice, and while I would have been able to run Oracle in a virtual server, I no longer have to worry about hardware constraints to our development.  Just license (which of course I realize is a problem for some people) and start loading the database.  I’m anxious to see how ArcGIS connects to Oracle Spatial on EC2 and what kind of performance I can expect.

Cloudzilla carries Oracle onshore

Cloudzilla could be unbeatable with Oracle in his hands

Now for those who want to avoid Oracle, MySQL Enterprise as well in the Amazon Cloud.

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