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Thinking About BlazeDS with Amazon ES2

With the current focus on Amazon's services (because of the release of SimpleDB) as well as the release of BlazeDS, I was wondering whether Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (aka EC2) could be used with BlazeDS. I know that people set up Tomcat on EC2, and it'd be pretty interesting to start using BlazeDS on projects so easily.

Reading about EC2, I see that there's two ways to get data from your application, SOAP and a query API. The query API looks like it would work fine for getting AMF information from an application. I assume, however, that some changes some need to be made to Flex channels and adaptors to work with the request signatures required by Amazon? I don't know enough about EC2 or BlazeDS to answer this question, or to know whether StreamingAMFChannel would work. But I'd love see instructions on creating an Amazon Machine Image containing BlazeDS.

Comments (4)

What I would love to see is the python version of the RTMP server which runs over twisted Python have some smarts, so that if connections start to reach limits you could set it to start another EC2 instance and add that instance to the possible server connection pool. Then you would have an elastic RTMP server for all sorts of projects that scales on demand :)

Campbell, looks like there's alpha AMF module for Twisted available now:

http://twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-python/2007-December/016447.html

I setup a copy of FDS on EC2. FDS is what BlazeDS was called. There are no changes you need to make. Think of EC2 as a shared server, but you get to pick what goes on it. Pick a linux image, deploy it, make sure java is installed, then upload blazeds. run tomcat.

then authorize port 8080, the default tomcat port, for everyone. that's all there is to it. eventually you'll want to configure it so that your calls get proxied through some web server back to your tomcat instance, but for development purposes, just install tomcat.

you might be mixing up EC2 and S3. S3 is Amazon's storage service. it is just a way of putting data up on amazon and getting it back. you can't install a program or script, on it. ec2 is the "server" service, where you get what looks like a full blown server just for yourself.

it's cheap, it's reliable, and i like using it.

Robert, I must have gone from EC2 to S3 in my reading on Amazon. It looked like you could only serve data in a very specific way in EC2, but I take it that's only for S3. That's good to know.