Late in 2009, I was compelled to get back into working with Amazon Web Services. I hadn't touched them for several years, but felt like I had to get "hands on" again after spending most of my vocational efforts on the political and managerial aspects of technology. That, plus I'm too cheap to spend $55 for an annual subscription to Carbonite and figured I could home brew a solution on the cheap!
Happily, it was like riding a bike. I trusted in my old, dear friend, PHP and followed my natural curiosity as Alice followed the White Rabbit -- with reckless abandon. After a little research and having found the Tarzan API -- now called CloudFusion -- it took a weekend to write a web-based interface to Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) that now stores a number of my files.
That mountain conquered, now what? Technology is like a bucket of hot buffalo wings...you can't stop at just one. This is especially true while you're riding the intellectual high of a successfully completed project and need something to do with your hands once you stop patting yourself on the back.
After a particularly non-inspiring meeting this past week, I've set my sights on Amazon SimpleDB. Not sure what the hell I'm going to do with it, but with the low-ball cloud pricing AWS offers, I'll figure out something, even if it's trivial. Worst case, it will set me up to leverage it and S3 to branch out into an EC2 project.
