Monday, August 28, 2006

AJAX front-end and network drive front-end for Amazon S3 service

Openfount has created an AJAX front-end for graphical Amazon S3 storage management.  I have only very basically played around with the Openfount product, but it is very cool and I like the fact that because it is written in AJAX, it is platform-independent.  For those note familiar with Amazon S3, it is a pay for what you use storage system hosted by Amazon with a simple pricing structure: $0.15 per month for each GB stored and $0.20 per GB transferred.  You can’t access Amazon S3 simply and directly, in fact it is designed with a very minimal base feature set, so products like the Openfount S3 Manager are required for people like me that do not want to have to hard code and/or use command line interfaces in order to interface with the S3 service.

If you look on the Amazon S3 Solutions page, you will see that there are a number of developers creating various different interfaces for interacting with the S3 services, but Openfount’s AJAX web interface seems to be one of the better, free, multi platform, web-based solutions.

I will say that Jungle Disk is another interesting, free, multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) front-end to S3, but Jungle Disk acts as an actual network drive, not a web-based access platform.  To be honest, it seems like it would be a good idea to use Jungle Disk on my machines at the home and office, and to use Openfount S3 Manager as the web-based access when traveling and not using my own computer.  Note that Jungle Disk has a pretty cool utility on their main page that will allow you to do an easy comparison between Amazon S3 pricing and other service pricing.

I’m planning on using both of these service to back up all of my data in the next few weeks, so I’ll let you know what my experiences are and eventually what my total storage cost winds up being.

Link — Openfount main page

Link — Openfount S3 Manager

Link — Jungle Disk

Link — Amazon S3

Link — Amazon S3 Solutions

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