Back in February, I walked through the development of a Photo storage application. The application originally comes from one of the examples in the REST book Kenn Scribner and I wrote, Effective REST Services via .NET. Photo sharing and uploads allow for me to present a well understood application without providing a lot of background. For a photo, you upload it somewhere and store metadata about the photo itself. We already covered Google App Engine in February.
For this application, we will use Amazon Web Services, including SimpleDB, Simple Storage Service, and Elastic Compute Cloud. At the end, I’ll tell you what I thought of the experience. I’ll develop the application in F#. When I presented this code to the Midwest Cloud Computing Users Group for the April 2009 meeting, Amanda Laucher offered up that my use of F# used some idioms she hadn’t seen before. That’s a nice way of saying “You appear to be a n00b.” Please keep that in mind whenever you review my F# code.
I’ll also be showing a few helper libraries that are OpenSource (or similar). A nice thing about AWS is that the C# OpenSource community has come out and done a great job putting out great tools.
- S3: LitS3.
- SimpleDB: Amazon.SimpleDB.
For EC2, I used the application at https://console.aws.amazon.com as well as Windows Remote Desktop to setup and manage the EC2 instance. I use SimpleDB as a custom MembershipProvider for the ASP.NET application. Next time, we will look at how that provider was created.
Karmic Code Monkey 