A late and short note focused on cloud services. As I’m on holiday it is sometimes a bit harder to find the time to write these notes, luckily early Christmas morning is rainy so I had some time before anyone else tried to crawl out of their tents.
B2 Cloud Storage
BackBlaze last week opened their new B2 Cloud Storage service open in public beta, and it comes with free 10 GB of storage in this period. You don’t even need a credit card to sign up for it during this time, so there is no risk trying it either. Obviously aimed as a competitor to services like S3 this can be an interesting storage alternative, and might be worth checking out. For reasons explained in the first paragraph I haven’t tried this yet, but I do use Backblaze as my online backup service of choice which hopefully shows my confidence in both the quality of their service
AWS updates
In an effort to release even more updates in 2015, AWS announced a couple of interesting new things. First among those is their new t2.nano instance type. As the pricing for this comes down to less than 5 dollars per month (in U.S. East at least), that makes it a very nicely priced low powered machine. One you can easily use for running cronjobs or even chat integrations like Hubot.
There are two other interesting changes they introduced. The first is that there is now a managed service for NAT gateways. For private VPCs you always need one or more NAT gateways, to connect your servers to the Internet. If you’re infrastructure is very big this can become a bit of a hassle to maintain, in which case a load balanced setup like that provided by the service might be useful. Of course, if you don’t have many servers it might just be cheaper to use a micro, or now even a nano, instance instead.
Finally, and this one was definitely something that should have been introduced before, Cloudfront now supports sending gzipped contents. You only need to enable this on your distribution, and at that point everything that it can zip, will be zipped. This will obviously offer some nice speed and data advantages, so should be something that can be used by anyone using Cloudfront, even if it’s only because your Cloudfront invoice will go down.