Amazon S3: Data Storage Services

Its happening quicker than you and i probably realise.

Many of us are still struggling with laptop hard disks that are filled to the brim. We all carry our own USB keys. Many of us have bought unwieldy External USB hard disk enclosures and Network Attached Storage (NAS) that are now an emerging too fill the SOHO market segment.

But all of this is just, a precursor to where were heading. Which is online storage. No need to rely on localised hard disk storage.

Who says this better than Google: "With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc), .... We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today..... the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache"

Today, the only real large scale provider is Amazon. Amazon's s3 Web Services, provides a pay-as-you-go utility model for buying and using storage over the Internet. Essentially you need to sign-up for an Amazon S3 account, you are provided with your own Access ID and Secret Key for encrypting and decrypting your files on the network. If you lose it then you've lost your files its as simple as that.

Anyhow, i downloaded client tool (which relies on Amazon S3), called Jungle Disk (they even have a Mac client), and use that to connect to the Amazon service.

Its a fairly rudimentary client, but looking at the sheer size of resources behind Amazon S3 (e.g. Microsoft may be outsourcing some of their storage to them and smug-mug pass over 10Tb of pictures through Amazon S3) you kind of realise that this is a pretty sophisticated operation.

Am i ready to drop my iTunes music over into the big cloud, not yet. But its certainly the starting point for me to rationalise and make my content better shared between machines.

Mumbai 7-11 Blasts: "Govern or get out"

After the killing of 190 and injuring 650 people in Mumbai -- this the outcome of 8 highly targeted bombs on the Mumbai metro during rush hour, one wonders how much more should the citizens of India take?

The choice of Mumbai was not designed to unsettle the financial capital, but really meant to raise communal tensions between the Hindu majority and muslim minority. The riots in Gujarat are still not forgotten by the locals and lets now forget about the Mumbai blasts in 1993.

We don't need to look that far back, only last year Islamic terrorists bombed the holy Hindu city of Varanasi.

It beggars belief that India now has a Prime Minister who is completely at ease at talking about macroeconomic and how the diaspora can be unleashed across globe, but yet when slapped in the face countless times with blatant attacks on Indian sovereignty, can only meekly state: "Do not be provoked by rumours. Do not let anyone divide us. Our strength lies in our unity."

Its time for India to step up and deal with these Al-Qaeda terrorists. Both Lashkar-e Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad are part of the terrorist infrastructure that has many sympathisers in Pakistan. This continued passive, tacit and turning a blind-eye support for terrorism must stop.

Opposition party, Advani, summarises it well about the situation for the Indian PM: "Govern or get out".

On another sad note, still lingering from the tragedy of the Mumbai bombs, im surprised at the lack of news coverage from the British press, in comparison to the London and Madrid bombings. Picked politics, captures my sentiments more succinctly, "clearly the death of nearly two hundred and injuries of thousands of wogs was not good enough for the Dail Mail, Daily Express or the Metro to make it front page news. Fuck them. "

This is a timley reminder, for me at least, of how important it is to continue blogging.