The Amazon Web Services Developer Connection site has a great tutorial that will show you how to Mount Amazon S3 as a File System in Amazon EC2. S3 is Amazon’s distributed storage service and EC2 is their distributed, virtualized server solution. In the past it was difficult to have persistent storage in EC2, but now using S3, persistent storage is possible.
Amazon Web Services Developer Connection is starting to gather a great collection of tutorials for using their amazing web services. Building a Web Application with Ruby on Rails and Amazon S3 is one that caught my eye. It is full of short examples that shows virtually every part of the S3 service and how to access it using Rails.
The Amazon Web Services Developer Connection has an 18 minute screencast that will show you how to Set up and Run Amazon EC2 from Windows. EC2 is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud web service. With EC2 you can setup and run your own virtual server for less than $80 per month.
S3 Firefox Organizer is a Firefox extension that will let you transfer files to and from your Amazon S3 account. The UI is pretty simple and works quite well. My only beef with is that the extension does a poor job of representing folders on your S3 account. Otherwise, the extension works as promised. For those of you not familiar with the Amazon S3 service, it is a great and cheap way to store/backup your data offsite.
