Tech Stuff

I came across an interesting article on the New York Times site that talks about how they used Amazon EC2 and S3 to help make their articles from 1851 -1922 available to the public online.  There was a total of 11 million articles.  They had to take sometimes several TIFF images and scale and glue them together to create one PDF version of the article.  They used 100 EC2 instances to complete the job in just under 24 hours.  They started with 4TB of data that was uploaded into S3 and through the conversion process created another 1.5TB.

In an articles on Forbes.com, “The Death of Hardware”, they discuss Zillow and their recent use of Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform to recalculate the values of some 67 million homes for their site.  Zillow estimated the task would take 6 months and millions of dollars before they went with the EC2 platform which was about $50,000, roughly 3 weeks and used 500 servers.

In the article Forbes also mentions that Microsoft is expected to roll out their own form of the computing cloud (Windows Live Core) this month which is aimed at large businesses. Yahoo is expected to release theirs later this year. With the talk about Microsoft purchasing Yahoo we will have to see if the cloud happens for Yahoo. I hope Yahoo does as I would think their platform would be linux based and that is what I am looking for. Would be nice to see more competition in the space which would help drive more advancements and hopefully even lower prices.