Image via
Wikipedia
As Cloud evangelists, we never shy away from talking about how New York Times
used Amazon EC2 to convert full page images of its newspapers from 1851 to 1922
into PDF using Amazon EC2. In fact, this is one of the early cloud
success stories.
Using Amazon Web
Services, Hadoop and our own code,
we ingested 405,000 very large TIFF images, 3.3 million articles in SGML and
405,000 xml files mapping articles to rectangular regions in the TIFF’s. This
data was converted to a more web-friendly 810,000 PNG images (thumbnails and
full images) and 405,000 JavaScript files — all of it ready to be assembled into
a TimesMachine. By leveraging the power of AWS and Hadoop, we were able to
utilize hundreds of machines concurrently and process all the data in less than
36 hours.
In fact, the utility nature of the cloud has helped save tons of money for
many companies. There is another story that highlights how media companies could
tap into the cloud for getting their work done. For the last couple of days, the
talk of the Cloudville is a new paper released by a team from University of Berkeley offering
their view about Cloud Computing. It is a must read paper for anyone remotely
interested in this field. Here is a nugget from the paper that talks about the
above said example
Peter Harkins, a Senior Engineer at The Washington Post, used 200 EC2
instances (1,407 server hours) to convert 17,481 pages of Hillary Clinton’s
travel documents into a form more friendly to use on the WWW within nine hours
after they were released
Such advantages are not just available for big companies. We all can tap into
the cloud for powerful computing resources. Using a not so powerful desktop or
laptop, we can access X Windows running on a Linux Amazon EC2 instance (Note:
You need not use VNC and you can use NX software that is part of Ubuntu to do
the same) or tap the power of an EC2 instance to do video processing, etc.. The
availability of computing resources on the cloud has opened up new vistas which
both businesses and consumers can take advantage. And, this is the power of
cloud computing.
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Power Of Clouds: Amazon EC2 Helps A Traditional Media Company Again
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