Employee Scheduling Software At Its Best
The pre-party has officially started! As you are aware, we have been hard at work developing an employee scheduling program, with the sole intent of developing a program which delivers a fast ROI to hospitality management, and makes scheduling requests and employee notifications as simple as possible. We're almost there .... The new software is called
TimeForge.If you are interested in being one of the first users on timeforge, head over to the website and sign up for the TimeForge User's newsletter. Everyone who signs up for the newsletter before we launch will receive between 6 and 12 months of free use of our revolutionary scheduling software. The software is scheduled for an official launch by late February, 2007.
Amazon.com's EC2, Part Three
EC2's weakest "point" is that data inside of the virtual machine only lives as long as the machine is powered off. When the machine turns off, all of the data is lost, unless it has also been saved somewhere else. One way to store data off of the instance is to use Amazon's S3 service, which works fine for storing "regular" files, but does not work as well with remote storage of real time information, it could take more than 10seconds for file changes to appear on S3. For many applications, for instance database storage, S3's service would be extremely cumbersome.
A few third-party tools have appeared to try and help solve the remote file storage problem, the most prominent of which is
S3InfiniDisk. S3InfiDisk is a filesystem, based on the FUSE project, and includes caching of data, and multi-write and multi-read access to S3's storage buckets. I have not yet tried out S3InfiniDisk, but its creators claim that it is fast enough to use beneath a modern database, like PostgreSQL or MySQL.
We will likely continue to use, and evaluate, EC2 for our infrastructure needs, both internally, and for our clients.
Amazon.com's EC2, Part Two
Setting up an
EC2 account only takes a few moments of time, and the documentation from Amazon is great. They have a great get started guide,
which is located here. There is also a good
video for Windows users.
EC2 is a service built on Amazon.com's Sun Grid, using Xen (x86) instances, and is capable of running Linux and Windows (using emulation). Access to the grid is through Amazon's set of Java tools, or through a web API. There are also some 3rd party tools that are beginning to appear to ease the administration and deployment of the EC2 and S3 products, including
AWS Console.
After using EC2 for a few weeks, it appears to live up to all of the hype, even as a Beta product. Transfers to and from EC2 were extremely fast, in many cases I was able to achieve a consistent 400K/second (more than 2 full T1's). The images that I have launched have also been very fast when compiling programs, and running them.
Amazon.com's EC2, Part One
I first wrote about
Amazon.com's EC2 Service many months ago,
when it was first released. I had promised to update my readers on its stability and capabilities at a later date. Today is that day.
We are currently developing an application which needs a lot of "go-juice" - plenty of computing power to crunch a lot of numbers. Although we could buy physical servers to handle the increasing load on our software service, this will require us to spend money - a significant capital expenditure. As an alternative, we are researching the possibilities afforded us by using Amazon.com's significantly cheaper virtual servers, and expand onto their Grid.
Each server, when run 24x7 throughout the month, is less than $80.
