Jiaqi's Blog

On Nov 14th, in AWS re:invent conference day 2 keynote , Netflix announced 2013 Cloud Prize award winners . I was very lucky and my project, datamung , is one of the ten winners. Datamung received the award for best datastore integration. Datamung is a Java open source web application that backs up RDS MySQL database into S3 using AWS Simple Workflow and EC2. It's a RESTful service and website on top of it, a single installation allows multiple AWS users to backup their database living in their own AWS accounts. The fact that it uses mysqldump command indicates that the backup result in S3 is a SQL file ready to use across AWS accounts, regions, VPC, or outside of AWS network. If you are interested please jump into the Datamung project wiki to find out more. Ironically, in the same keynote session where winner list was announced, 40 minutes later Werner Vogels announced a cross-region RDS replication feature which targets the same problem that Datamung attempts to so...

Amazon AWS Simple Workflow AWS Simple Workflow(SWF) from Amazon is a unique workflow solution comparing to traditional workflow products such as JBPM and OSWorkflow. SWF is extremely scalable and engineer friendly(in that flow is defined with Java code) while it comes with limitations and lots of gotchas. Always use Flow Framework The very first thing to know is, it's almost impossible to build a SWF application correctly without Flow Framework . Even though the low level SWF RESTful service API is public and available in SDK, for most workflow with parallelism, timer or notification, consider all possibilities of how each event can interlace with another, it's beyond manageable to write correct code with low-level API to cover all use cases. For this matter SWF is quite unique comparing to other thin-client AWS technologies. The SWF flow framework heavily depends on AspectJ for various purposes. If you are not familiar with AspectJ in Eclipse and Maven, this article ...