cloud

I've got my head around creating cloud instances in AWS, Azure and Rackspace. However, I need to turn my instances off at the end of the day and on in the morning as this will half my hosting cost (they are for development). I've looked at a few management services but they blew my brains out. Is there a simple way to do this? Steffen Opel Approach You could always roll your own solution, insofar most cloud providers offer a respective API to start/stop instances on demand (or even on schedule), which is what those management services are actually using as well of course - the AmazonEC2 Java

What alternatives are there to GAE, given that I already have a good bit of code working that I would like to keep. In other words, I'm digging python. However, my use case is more of a low number of requests, higher CPU usage type use case, and I'm worried that I may not be able to stay with App Engine forever. I have heard a lot of people talking about Amazon Web Services and other sorts of cloud providers, but I am having a hard time seeing where most of these other offerings provide the range of services (data querying, user authentication, automatic scaling) that App Engine provides. What

I have been looking for cloud computing / storage solutions for a long time (inspired by the Google Bigtable). But I can't find a easy-to-use, business-ready solution. I'm searching a simple, fault tolerant, distributed Key=>Value DB like SimpleDB from Amazon. I've seen things like: The CouchDB Project : Simple and distributed, fault-tolerant Database. But it understands only JSON. No XML connectors etc. Eucalyptus : Nice Amazon EC2 interfaces. Open Standards & XML. But less distributed and less fault-tolerant? There are also a lot of open tickets with XEN/VMWare issues. Cloudstore / Kosmosfs

Could anybody explain in plain words how Cloud computing works? I have read the Wikipedia article , but still not sure that I understand how cloud actually works. Aside from the latest marketing term? Basically all the resources your program needs are held "somewhere" on the internet. You interact with them via a defined service contract; SOAP, REST, POX or whatever and what happens after that is up to the service provider. You don't care about how your information is stored or how the service is provided, just that it is. If, for example, you wanted to store files, you may choose to use

I'm using Amazon's CloudFront to serve static files of my web apps. Is there no way to tell a cloudfront distribution that it needs to refresh it's file or point out a single file that should be refreshed? Amazon recommend that you version your files like logo_1.gif, logo_2.gif and so on as a workaround for this problem but that seems like a pretty stupid solution. Is there absolutely no other way? Good news. Amazon finally added an Invalidation Feature. See the API Reference . This is a sample request from the API Reference: POST /2010-08-01/distribution/[distribution ID]/invalidation HTTP/1

I have hosted my Homepage over Amazon's S3 system. In order to change information on the page, currently, I have to change the file on my computer and upload the new version. However, I would like to directly change the file in the S3 bucket within a browser (to change it anywhere). Is there a cloud-based text editor that can use S3 as a "file system" and would allow me to change text files (e.g., html, css, js, etc.)? I would use S3 Sync from the awscli to download the files and edit them locally before syncing them back to their original location and updating the originals. Documentation on