[Building Sakai] amazon cloud & resources

[Matthew Jones]

I think people are seriously confusing this issue.

To (try) to help clear it up.

- Amazon cloud drive was a service announced and released yesterday by
Amazon that's currently only available to US customers. It currently gives
users 5GB of *personal* storage which is upgradable. This is similar to
Dropbox, except they haven't been around as long (2 days) and don't have as
rich of a desktop integration. More importantly what would make the initial
question impossible right now is that Amazon doesn't have any external API
like Dropbox has. However some people are optimistic, so
it's definitely something to think about. [1]

- Amazon also has other storage solutions like S3 and EBS (if you're hosted
on EC2). This has been around for awhile, and it *might* be possible to hook
this up as a back-end to content hosting, but I haven't heard of anyone that
did it. This would be something the whole system would need to use and be
dynamically expandable. I'm not entirely sure of the cost advantages of
storing your own files locally verses S3, especially with some big sites
lately like Reddit pulling off this cloud storage and swapping cost savings
and convenience for reliability. [2] Some other platforms like moodle and
drupal have plugins for storing content on S3. This might have been what you
were asking about?

Locally at Umich we have a service called "MFile" which we considered
linking into Content Hosting to save students the step of copying their
work. This would be similar to how you'd link to Dropbox (which has an API)
or Amazon (when they do have an API), but we never put much effort into
this.

The Amazon cloud drive It seemed to come as a big time surprise. Many people
including those in the music industry are currently abuzz about it this
morning because one of the big features is how they advertised music
sharing. [3] It really came out of nowhere (at least to me), even though
Apple, Amazon and Google all were rumoring about some type of cloud options
for some time. I found out from Mathieu Plourde's Twitter account yesterday
afternoon and was pretty confused. ;)

[1]
http://stream.thisisapipe.com/post/4185443892/amazon-cloud-drive-is-not-dropbox
[2] http://blog.reddit.com/2011/03/why-reddit-was-down-for-6-of-last-24.html
[3]
http://www.pcworld.com/article/223696/amazons_cloud_drive_riles_music_industry.html

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 9:40 AM, Sean DeMonner <demonner at umich.edu> wrote:

> Are folks thinking about using the Cloud Drive to stream media? Looks like
> Amazon is moving in that direction:
>
>
> http://www.dailytech.com/Amazon+Debuts+Cloud+Drive+Media+Streaming+Service+Offers+5GB+for+Free/article21243.htm
>
> Would be nice to be able to stream content out of Sakai...
>
> SMD.
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 30, 2011, at 9:33 AM, Matthew Buckett wrote:
>
> > On 30 March 2011 10:13, Adam Marshall <adam.marshall at oucs.ox.ac.uk>
> wrote:
> >> I anybody looking at integrating Amazon's cloud drive with Sakai /
> Resources tool?
> >
> > At the moment I don't think there is an API to access Amazon's cloud
> > drive. I suspect it store's all it's content on S3 to which there is
> > API, but I don't think you can get at the cloud drive data through S3.
> >
> > I would be hopeful of Amazon releasing an API to cloud drive so that
> > other clients can use it.
> >
> > I think it's reasonable to provide some integration between S3 and
> > Resources so that large resources could be placed into S3 buckets but
> > presented through the Resources tool.
> >
> > --
> >   Matthew Buckett
> >   VLE Developer, LTG, Oxford University Computing Services
> > _______________________________________________
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>
> ====================================================
> Sean DeMonner, Assistant Director, Teaching & Learning, AIS, ITS
> 3350 Duderstadt Center, University of Michigan      (734) 615-9765
>
>
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