aws

[I'm a little late posting about this one, but it is still a cool feature]

AWS just keeps pumping out features. One of the latest was multi object delete in s3.

Previously, if you wanted to delete multiple objects within an s3 bucket, each delete operation had to be contained in a single API requests... which quite honestly is slow and clunky. If you wanted to delete 5,000 objects you are going to have to make 5,000 API calls.

Do you have to manage multiple EC2 accounts? Chances are if you use EC2 personally and at your place of work or for clients also, then that answer is yes. For many cases one can get away with just using the EC2 Console to manage things - changing accounts has the low burden of signing in and out.

But what if what you are doing requires running the ec2 command line scripts to automate something, or perhaps you just like using the CLI better. In this case, switching accounts is a bit more of a chore - you have a few environmental variables keys, and certs to take care of.

Amazon recently announced a new official Linux AMI for use on EC2. Basically, the AMI appears to be a stripped down distribution of CentOS that includes the ec2 command line tools, and a few common packages installed for a LAMP stack (Perl, Python, PHP, Mysql, Postgres, and Apache httpd). You can read more about it at http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/09/introducing-amazon-linux-ami.html .

My first though when I read this was "why?" Seriously, there is a glut of Linux backed AMIs available that are either official AMIs from Linux distributions or lots are bundled with specific software from software vendors. Why would Amazon AWS throw yet another offering in the mix with so much choice already?