Amazon recently announced their Elastic File System (EFS) service is now available for production use. The service was previously only available in preview mode for a single region, but is now available in production for the US West Oregon, US East Virginia and EU Ireland regions. EFS is a service similar to Elastic Block Storage (EBS) which provides disk mounted storage for EC2 instances, with a couple of key differences.
All posts by Lane Liles
AWS: CloudFormation Improvements
Amazon recently announced some improvements to AWS CloudFormation that should make pushing updates to existing stacks a bit easier in the future.
For those not familiar with it, AWS CloudFormation allows you to create and update any number of AWS resources in an automated and repeatable way. Basically, you can create a JSON template which specifies all the resources for a given “stack,” upload it to CloudFormation, and the service takes care of provisioning and updating all those resources automatically.
Google Cloud Vision
If you’re in need of something like Google Image search for your own image set application, then you are now in luck: Google recently announced their Cloud Vision API is entering public beta.
AVC: Software is the new oil
New York based venture capitalist Fred Wilson has an interesting post on his AVC blog today. It’s a quick read, and typical for a lot of Fred’s posts, there’s a lot of valuable discussion in the comments from his readers.
Facebook hits 1B users in one day
Mark Zuckerburg announced via a Facebook post that the company recently had 1 billion people use Facebook in a single day. It’s an impressive feat when you consider that’s about 1 in 7 people on the entire planet.
Apple Watch
After months of speculation and press events, the launch of Apple’s newest product is just around the corner. The Apple Watch is available for pre-order now, and will be available for sale in just a little over a week.
In similar f
ashion to the iPod and iPhone launched in the last decade, the Apple Watch is another case of Apple attempting to redefine an existing market. However, as John Gruber points out in his review of the Apple Watch, this time it’s a little bit different. Whereas many would argue that music players and phones generally sucked before the introduction of the iPod and iPhone respectively, the watch market is entirely different: “This time, the established market — watches — is not despised. They not only don’t suck, they are beloved. And the best and most-beloved watches aren’t even electronic. They’re purely mechanical — all gadget, no computer.”
Google Glass in Commerce
Google recently stopped sales of the Glass prototype which has been available for a couple of years, and announced that the product will be moved out of the research oriented Google X unit and into a separate division for continued development.
There has been a lot of press speculating what this all means for the future of Glass, but for the most part it seems like this is just the first step in seeing a broader, more consumer-oriented release. Instead of focusing on the consumer aspect though, I wanted to share a couple of links which highlight possible business applications for the device, specifically in B2C and B2B commerce.
Google announces Inbox
Today Google announced a new email application they’ve been working on called “Inbox”.
From the Google blog: “Years in the making, Inbox is by the same people who brought you Gmail, but it’s not Gmail: it’s a completely different type of inbox, designed to focus on what really matters.”
arvato Systems & hybris Labs Partnership
Our friends at arvato Systems North America recently announced an exciting partnership with hybris Labs. They have joined forces to form a joint research and development team focused on solving future commerce problems today.
One of the recent projects to come out of hybris Labs is the Smart Wine Shelf. This is an Internet of Things (IoT) application which supplements traditional brick-and-mortar commerce with an application and “smart wine shelf” to help customers choose a wine which matches their interest, and provide retailers with a wealth of market research data. Continue reading
Gource – Software Version Control Visualization
When working on large codebases with many contributors, it’s easy to lose sight of the amount of effort and change that is going into the overall project, especially when those contributors are spread across many teams and locations. Gource is a source code visualization tool which helps capture that “big picture” view of a project, providing a sense of the overall history and contributors to a project.
From the Gource homepage: “Software projects are displayed by Gource as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its centre. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project.”