Cloud computing comes to Galax

In the process of building their book empire, Amazon built an auspicious web and networking infrastructure. For years, we rolled our own. We found dragging the Mountain (bandwidth) to Galax was much more expensive (not to mention difficult) than moving to the Mountain (Denmark). We still maintained our own server which proved to be a liability.

Now we are heading to the Cloud. The first step (of a journey of a thousand miles) was to deploy content in the cloud. Not all that difficult but attentiion to detail was critical.

1. Start with an Amazon account. You can use the same account to buy books and cloud services. You do have to pay for what you use, so some sort of plastic money is handy.
2. Sign up for an AWS account. You haven't spent any money yet.
3. Sign up for an S3 account. You still haven't spent any money. Read this page carefully and you will have some idea what you are buying into. You will need to generate an "Access Key" and a "Secret Key". You will find this under Home > Your Account > Access Identifiers Save this page as you will need these later.
4. Download and install Firefox if you are not using it already. Free.
5. Using Tools, Addons, install S3 Fox organizer. Still free.
6. Restart Firefox and open S3 Fox - Tools, > S3 Organizer,
7. Click Manage Accounts and enter the "Access Key" and a "Secret Key" you set up in step #3.
8. If all goes well, you will see a two pane screen with your local file system on the left and your newly created S3 store on the right.
9. Choose one file in your local file system and move it to S3 by clicking the "Right Arrow".
10. Right click the uploaded file and choose Edit ACL. Click on all the red "X"s and make them green.
11. Right click on the now freely accessible file and choose "Copy URL to Clipboard". Paste that into the address bar of a Firefox window.

In spite of the typo, I now have a publicly viewable web page at http://tarvid.s3.amazonaws.com/html;/metta.html

More to come.