Looking at Clouds from Both Sides Now

I'll apologize up front for that horrible pun in the title.  No excuse, really.

After 18 months at Eucalyptus, the best private cloud vendor out there, I have decided to see what things are like on the public cloud side.  As of Monday, December 19, I will be a senior engineer at Amazon Web Services.

I was very reluctant to leave Eucalyptus.  It is a great company, full of great people and with a corporate culture that absolutely cannot be beat.  And, while a lot of people's attention has been focused on shiny new things over the past year, Eucalyptus has quietly and steadily built amazing sales, support, marketing and professional services teams to match their already awesome engineering team.  2012 is going to be another kick-ass year for Eucalyptus and I really hate to miss that.

But the idea of seeing how the sausage is made at the biggest public cloud is an opportunity I couldn't pass up.  In my new job, I will still be focusing on software tools and how to make it easier for developer's to use cloud infrastructures, both public and private.  I will still be doing a lot of Python stuff and definitely still making sure that boto stays a popular, useful and independent open source project just as it did while I was at Eucalyptus.

It should be fun!

Don't reboot me, bro!

If you are an AWS user with EC2 instances running, you may have already gotten an email from AWS informing you that your instance(s) will be rebooted in the near future.  I'm not exactly sure what is prompting this massive rebooting binge but the good folks at AWS have actually provided a new EC2 API request just so you can find out about upcoming maintenance events planned for your instances.

We just committed code to boto that adds support for the new DescribeInstanceStatus request.  Using this, you can programmatically query the status of any or all of your EC2 instances and find out if there is a reboot in their future and, if so, when to expect it.

Here's an example of using the new method and accessing the data returned by it.