EC2 for poets
“Roadmap and vision for the EC2 for Poets howto: http://howto.opml.org/dave/ec2/ "
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Hey, good morning everybody.
This is Dave Winer and I’m here to talk to you about a new thing that’s coming out today called EC2 for poets.
Now I do this little podcast thing. I used to do them very frequently . This is like the way I begin them all these days . I used to do them really frequently. Now I like to do them on special occasions or like when I want to do an interview with somebody. For example, I did a podcast when we did the open source release of Frontier that was back in I guess 2005. I think it was 2004 -2005.
Quite a while ago already. And so I did a podcast back then that explained why and what my expectations were and my hopes were for it. And I find it’s a good idea to do one of these podcasts when something may have some more meaning to it than might be immediately apparent. So this is a good way for me to explain that. So I guess let’s start with the name EC2 for poets. It came from the name of a class that we had at the University of Wisconsin where when I was a grad student there it was called Computer Science for Poets. And I thought it was a beautiful idea and something that we need a lot more of which is take something that’s inherently technical and instead of doing what techn ologists like to do with it which is make it mysterious is to try to take as much of the mystery out of it as possible you know and make try to make it easy and it can be done with some amazing results. You know it’s like riding a bicycle. If you were to describe to somebody the components of bicycle riding whether there’s a pedal and there’s the handlebars and there’s brakes and gears and wheels and there are potholes and nasty cars car doors opening you know and whatever all these things that can go wrong you might never want to ride a bike . But if instead you said describe the experience of riding a bike and then said really this is how you do it never mind all the theory of it this is the how-to part of it then a lot more people would ride bikes in fact our parents probably for many of us our parents did that basically involved just taking you out and putting on the bike and running alongside with you remember this very well as a child dad would run alongside and he would hold the bike seat and he’d go well I can’t be too bad because my father’s right there holding the seat and then after a while you’d look he wasn’t there and that was that because basically bike riding there’s part of bike riding that you just can’t like understand that the wheels go forward the forward motion of the wheels always moving forward right that is the vector of the bike getting such a thing to tip over actually is pretty hard and so bikes don’t tend to tip over they tend to stay upright and seems kind of counterintuitive that’s the way it is so I looked at EC2 as being this like wonderful thing but I found it very difficult to get started with it because at first it was well because it had all these like ideas these things called let me get this up on my screen just rattle off some of the names that they use here running instances EBS volumes key pairs elastic IPs E BS snapshots security groups AMIs EC2 itself these are all names that don’t mean a whole lot to a normal person and and if I told you what some of them stood for like IP or EC2 or EBS or whatever it wouldn’t do very much to enhance that you know you wouldn’t understand any better some things like for example like security groups actually have a name in the in the world that we are all sort of familiar with and it would be easier if they were to use those that name was a firewall basically so I got through this with some help from documentation that was written by people at Amazon and elsewhere and just by sorting through stuff and and they’re hard one lessons but once I got through it I realized I think that almost any technical user could do this and I was thinking of somebody like scoble or even naked Jen neither of which probably would ever in a million years think that they could create a server running on EC2 but I think that they could or I thought that they could and so that’s why I wrote EC2 for poets and it not only goes back to Wisconsin but it also goes back a little bit not quite as for when I started using CompuServe and this was like in the early 1980s and I really wanted to put my own software up there you know because I was a software writer and I had all these ideas for things that would work better than what they already had up there whether they actually would or wouldn’t is remains to be seen I never I never got the chance because well because they didn ’t let people run software up in their cloud but Amazon did let does let people in fact that’s their business this is the same Amazon that you buy shirts from or refrigerators amazing that they’re in this business at all and their offer is bait is basically this is that we will run the server for you and you can start these servers anytime you want and you can shut them down anytime you want you don’t need to do a special contract with us you don’t need to call anybody in our any buddy in our office any sales people nobody’s going to pitch you on buying anything more nobody’s going to laugh at you for not understanding stuff that you that you don’t understand I think that’s some of the barriers why would you ever want to call up you know a hosting company you know I mean that must be a little bit intimidating if I find it intimidating I imagine that other people do as well but with Amazon there’s none of that you just go there and you create your server the same way you same way you buy a book or a pair of blue jeans or a refrigerator you just use the online system to create it now it’s a little bit more complicated and but that’s what you see to for posts is all about it says basically come to me as a intelligent person who is interested in this idea and give me up to an hour of your time and in that hour I will show you how to set up a server and you actually set up the server and you’ll go to a web page that’s hosted on your own site on your own server now what’s the point of this exercise well there are couple at least a couple of them one is to learn and not just for you to learn although of course that’s important it’s also for me to learn I want to see if my theory is true that people get normal people could actually set up a server in the cloud and so if you’re successful with it I really encourage you to post a comment there on the at the end of the how-to that says hey it worked and this is what I know I did and these are the maybe this is where I found a problem with it or whatever and we’ll sort of go back and fix it but I’m also interested in learning what are your ideas now that you know that you can do this and not only do you know it because there’s a difference between knowing it and really feeling it really knowing it at a level of oh actually did it but that may unlock a lot of ideas and maybe even some feature requests so if you know some developers who create server software and say well can I run that and they’ll say no no no you can’t run that it’s too complicated said no try this EC2 for poets thing I was able to get a server up and running doing that and that might open up the developers eyes a little bit to say oh my god maybe people can actually do this and so maybe they’ll do some more packaging because there’s nothing inherently more complicated about installing software in a server than there is about installing software on your Mac or PC it’s pretty much the same thing in fact it’s exactly the same thing I installed Firefox on the prototype server that you’re all you know when you go through the process of setting up your own server on EC2 for poets well it’s you get a server that that also has a copy of Firefox installed on it because I think Firefox is a safer better browser than than than MSI is and I installed it the same way I installed it on my ASUS EEPC 1000 HE which I just got you go to mo zilla. com and you download they say I want to install this and it installs it takes all the mystery out of it when you realize that the the box that’s sitting up there is just like the one that’s on your desk if you haven’t have a Windows machine if you don’t have a Windows machine then it’s a lot like your box but not running the same operating system as yours does another thing that happened that made this possible was that and this was only recently that Microsoft decided somehow that Windows XP could be installed this way and it created an opportunity that they didn’t make a big deal out of but I think it really is a big deal that that anybody now can create their own version of Windows that’s basically what I’ve done you know when you install when you create this is the terminology when you create an instance of my AMI don’t worry what is Amazon machine image does that help but that’s what AMI stands for when you create an instance of that you’re actually installing a version of Windows that I created specifically for this experiment I think that is an amazing bit of power that has gone way under reported and underappreci ated and I think it’s incredibly cool and you know if you’re a developer type this is something that you can do as well you can also by the way I should mention you can do it with with Linux is you know and they have all different flavors of Linux up there because Linux is open source so they can freely distribute that but up until like a few months ago I think it was like about six months ago it was only Linux but that’s when they made their deal with Microsoft and and all of a sudden you could do it with Windows - and I thought that was really awesome so what is this enable well the way I think about it is they call it well first I call it EC 2 for poets I’ve already hopefully explained what that means and in terms of it’s like the roadmap where is this going I think of it as shrink wrap software in the sky back in the 80s and we don’t do this anymore so the idea of shrink wrap software now is more of a concept than and something that really many people do although you do do it like I’ve got a copy of Spore here from Will Wright and Spore comes in a box not actually inside of shrink wrap but it could be and to install it I take out the CD and I stick it into my computer and up pops the program that says please install me and I install it and a few minutes later I’m running Spore I think that is where we can go I also think there’s another goal here is that by showing the quickest shortest path to getting a server up and running this sets a baseline for not only Amazon although I really if it just set a baseline for Amazon that would be great it would be enough for me this is a document that we can improve on in other words look at every step in this process as an opportunity to create a default and thereby saying that the user doesn’t actually have to set up a security group or create a key pair or all of the things that you have to do which aren’t really too much for somebody to do they don’t represent you turtle but maybe we could streamline that process so that’s that’s benchmark that’s baseline number one now there’s another baseline here that it sets another sort of let’s not go any lower than this for Amazon’s competitors so I’d love to see somebody else produce a rack space for poets that gets you up doing more or less the same thing in fact should be exactly the same thing when you’re also when all said and done so let’s see how that compares to the EC to for poets is it longer well then rack space has some work to do is it shorter well then Amazon has some work to do let’s also get one of these going for App Engine App Engine has the potential I think to be even simpler than all of these things it means creating an installer for Python apps and and packaging these things up in such a way so that the user just has to go type some information into a web page and click submit and boom they’ve got one of whatever and there came up a really interesting opportunity for that with Jaikou which was just released as open source in the same time frame that I was producing this document and I asked the question on scripting news well how do I create one of these things and the answer came back was a document that I absolutely couldn’t understand and I didn’t feel like it met me at a reasonable place so what I’d like to see is not just an App Engine for poets but a Jaikou for poets in other words something that a person who wants their own micro blogging system can run through step through step by step and create their own Jaik ou another one is the Leconica for poets and my friend Ken Sedgwick fellow Berk leyite has got an incredibly good start on that and that is something I hope to participate in in the next few weeks I hope to have that going and and then you’ve got basically competitor to this hypothetical Jaikou for poets in other words it’s time to stop thinking about these servers as being things for geeks and start thinking of the bathroom for people with ideas and then you’re gonna then we’re really gonna see an explosion also also think about designers when you’re doing this so far designers have had played no role in the development of micro blogging think about it Twitter doesn’t have a way for somebody to set a template like blogs did and so think about how you can involve designers in this as well and and then once all this is done where we’ll be is where I think we need to be which is and where more and more people realize we need to be you know this happens early in every technology that we end up relying on a technology company too much and but it’s at first it makes perfect sense because we don’t understand the technology so we need somebody to set it up for us and make it simple but then that has its downside because we end up being controlled by them and they may be taking us someplace where we don’t want to go and so then the users break out and they do it on their own it happens all the time it happened in the PC software era with copy protection it happened with networking with the web you know the big technology companies of the day were trying to create them the real network that everybody would use and for while it worked we use their networks until we realized what we really wanted was to not have any technology companies at all controlling us and you know and then it happened it happens all the time as part of the cycle of technology well if this cycle with Twitter is like every other cycle when there’s no reason to believe it’s not there will come a point in time where we’re going to want to operate our own Twitter’s and the easier it is to do it the sooner that is going to come and the more growth we’re going to see as a result of it so consider EC2 for poets my contribution to that process of let’s make this happen sooner rather than later and so that’s and then I guess the last part of the road map is a very personal one I want to be able to create software that runs shrink wrap software that runs in the cloud and so I needed to show people how to do this so that I could then ship products into the space and interestingly once you’ve installed or at least interesting to me that once you’ve installed the the image that’s called for in EC2 for poets you now have a copy of my opml editor running and it’s listening on the it’s it’s a web server which means it’s listening on port 80 not that everybody knows exactly what that means and there is a command in the miss menu MISC menu called tool catalog and if you select it you’ll see a list of things that you can install so there’s a news river aggregator there’s the Twitter calendar which archives the tweets your tweets and the tweets of the people you’re following and there are many many other things in there and there’ll be more over time first I need to catch my breath and some of you guys now it’s your turn to get busy hopefully a bunch of people will try this out over the weekend and into next week and ask questions if you hit problems let us know what they are there are already quite a few EC2 people who know they’re way better than I do around the EC2 because I’m still very much a newbie in this cloud business and they’re gathered around and we’re sort of waiting to see what will happen so I hope you give it a try and that’s about it thank you very much for your attention and see you real soon all over the web okay bye bye
This is Dave Winer and I’m here to talk to you about a new thing that’s coming out today called EC2 for poets.
Now I do this little podcast thing. I used to do them very frequently . This is like the way I begin them all these days . I used to do them really frequently. Now I like to do them on special occasions or like when I want to do an interview with somebody. For example, I did a podcast when we did the open source release of Frontier that was back in I guess 2005. I think it was 2004 -2005.
Quite a while ago already. And so I did a podcast back then that explained why and what my expectations were and my hopes were for it. And I find it’s a good idea to do one of these podcasts when something may have some more meaning to it than might be immediately apparent. So this is a good way for me to explain that. So I guess let’s start with the name EC2 for poets. It came from the name of a class that we had at the University of Wisconsin where when I was a grad student there it was called Computer Science for Poets. And I thought it was a beautiful idea and something that we need a lot more of which is take something that’s inherently technical and instead of doing what techn ologists like to do with it which is make it mysterious is to try to take as much of the mystery out of it as possible you know and make try to make it easy and it can be done with some amazing results. You know it’s like riding a bicycle. If you were to describe to somebody the components of bicycle riding whether there’s a pedal and there’s the handlebars and there’s brakes and gears and wheels and there are potholes and nasty cars car doors opening you know and whatever all these things that can go wrong you might never want to ride a bike . But if instead you said describe the experience of riding a bike and then said really this is how you do it never mind all the theory of it this is the how-to part of it then a lot more people would ride bikes in fact our parents probably for many of us our parents did that basically involved just taking you out and putting on the bike and running alongside with you remember this very well as a child dad would run alongside and he would hold the bike seat and he’d go well I can’t be too bad because my father’s right there holding the seat and then after a while you’d look he wasn’t there and that was that because basically bike riding there’s part of bike riding that you just can’t like understand that the wheels go forward the forward motion of the wheels always moving forward right that is the vector of the bike getting such a thing to tip over actually is pretty hard and so bikes don’t tend to tip over they tend to stay upright and seems kind of counterintuitive that’s the way it is so I looked at EC2 as being this like wonderful thing but I found it very difficult to get started with it because at first it was well because it had all these like ideas these things called let me get this up on my screen just rattle off some of the names that they use here running instances EBS volumes key pairs elastic IPs E BS snapshots security groups AMIs EC2 itself these are all names that don’t mean a whole lot to a normal person and and if I told you what some of them stood for like IP or EC2 or EBS or whatever it wouldn’t do very much to enhance that you know you wouldn’t understand any better some things like for example like security groups actually have a name in the in the world that we are all sort of familiar with and it would be easier if they were to use those that name was a firewall basically so I got through this with some help from documentation that was written by people at Amazon and elsewhere and just by sorting through stuff and and they’re hard one lessons but once I got through it I realized I think that almost any technical user could do this and I was thinking of somebody like scoble or even naked Jen neither of which probably would ever in a million years think that they could create a server running on EC2 but I think that they could or I thought that they could and so that’s why I wrote EC2 for poets and it not only goes back to Wisconsin but it also goes back a little bit not quite as for when I started using CompuServe and this was like in the early 1980s and I really wanted to put my own software up there you know because I was a software writer and I had all these ideas for things that would work better than what they already had up there whether they actually would or wouldn’t is remains to be seen I never I never got the chance because well because they didn ’t let people run software up in their cloud but Amazon did let does let people in fact that’s their business this is the same Amazon that you buy shirts from or refrigerators amazing that they’re in this business at all and their offer is bait is basically this is that we will run the server for you and you can start these servers anytime you want and you can shut them down anytime you want you don’t need to do a special contract with us you don’t need to call anybody in our any buddy in our office any sales people nobody’s going to pitch you on buying anything more nobody’s going to laugh at you for not understanding stuff that you that you don’t understand I think that’s some of the barriers why would you ever want to call up you know a hosting company you know I mean that must be a little bit intimidating if I find it intimidating I imagine that other people do as well but with Amazon there’s none of that you just go there and you create your server the same way you same way you buy a book or a pair of blue jeans or a refrigerator you just use the online system to create it now it’s a little bit more complicated and but that’s what you see to for posts is all about it says basically come to me as a intelligent person who is interested in this idea and give me up to an hour of your time and in that hour I will show you how to set up a server and you actually set up the server and you’ll go to a web page that’s hosted on your own site on your own server now what’s the point of this exercise well there are couple at least a couple of them one is to learn and not just for you to learn although of course that’s important it’s also for me to learn I want to see if my theory is true that people get normal people could actually set up a server in the cloud and so if you’re successful with it I really encourage you to post a comment there on the at the end of the how-to that says hey it worked and this is what I know I did and these are the maybe this is where I found a problem with it or whatever and we’ll sort of go back and fix it but I’m also interested in learning what are your ideas now that you know that you can do this and not only do you know it because there’s a difference between knowing it and really feeling it really knowing it at a level of oh actually did it but that may unlock a lot of ideas and maybe even some feature requests so if you know some developers who create server software and say well can I run that and they’ll say no no no you can’t run that it’s too complicated said no try this EC2 for poets thing I was able to get a server up and running doing that and that might open up the developers eyes a little bit to say oh my god maybe people can actually do this and so maybe they’ll do some more packaging because there’s nothing inherently more complicated about installing software in a server than there is about installing software on your Mac or PC it’s pretty much the same thing in fact it’s exactly the same thing I installed Firefox on the prototype server that you’re all you know when you go through the process of setting up your own server on EC2 for poets well it’s you get a server that that also has a copy of Firefox installed on it because I think Firefox is a safer better browser than than than MSI is and I installed it the same way I installed it on my ASUS EEPC 1000 HE which I just got you go to mo zilla. com and you download they say I want to install this and it installs it takes all the mystery out of it when you realize that the the box that’s sitting up there is just like the one that’s on your desk if you haven’t have a Windows machine if you don’t have a Windows machine then it’s a lot like your box but not running the same operating system as yours does another thing that happened that made this possible was that and this was only recently that Microsoft decided somehow that Windows XP could be installed this way and it created an opportunity that they didn’t make a big deal out of but I think it really is a big deal that that anybody now can create their own version of Windows that’s basically what I’ve done you know when you install when you create this is the terminology when you create an instance of my AMI don’t worry what is Amazon machine image does that help but that’s what AMI stands for when you create an instance of that you’re actually installing a version of Windows that I created specifically for this experiment I think that is an amazing bit of power that has gone way under reported and underappreci ated and I think it’s incredibly cool and you know if you’re a developer type this is something that you can do as well you can also by the way I should mention you can do it with with Linux is you know and they have all different flavors of Linux up there because Linux is open source so they can freely distribute that but up until like a few months ago I think it was like about six months ago it was only Linux but that’s when they made their deal with Microsoft and and all of a sudden you could do it with Windows - and I thought that was really awesome so what is this enable well the way I think about it is they call it well first I call it EC 2 for poets I’ve already hopefully explained what that means and in terms of it’s like the roadmap where is this going I think of it as shrink wrap software in the sky back in the 80s and we don’t do this anymore so the idea of shrink wrap software now is more of a concept than and something that really many people do although you do do it like I’ve got a copy of Spore here from Will Wright and Spore comes in a box not actually inside of shrink wrap but it could be and to install it I take out the CD and I stick it into my computer and up pops the program that says please install me and I install it and a few minutes later I’m running Spore I think that is where we can go I also think there’s another goal here is that by showing the quickest shortest path to getting a server up and running this sets a baseline for not only Amazon although I really if it just set a baseline for Amazon that would be great it would be enough for me this is a document that we can improve on in other words look at every step in this process as an opportunity to create a default and thereby saying that the user doesn’t actually have to set up a security group or create a key pair or all of the things that you have to do which aren’t really too much for somebody to do they don’t represent you turtle but maybe we could streamline that process so that’s that’s benchmark that’s baseline number one now there’s another baseline here that it sets another sort of let’s not go any lower than this for Amazon’s competitors so I’d love to see somebody else produce a rack space for poets that gets you up doing more or less the same thing in fact should be exactly the same thing when you’re also when all said and done so let’s see how that compares to the EC to for poets is it longer well then rack space has some work to do is it shorter well then Amazon has some work to do let’s also get one of these going for App Engine App Engine has the potential I think to be even simpler than all of these things it means creating an installer for Python apps and and packaging these things up in such a way so that the user just has to go type some information into a web page and click submit and boom they’ve got one of whatever and there came up a really interesting opportunity for that with Jaikou which was just released as open source in the same time frame that I was producing this document and I asked the question on scripting news well how do I create one of these things and the answer came back was a document that I absolutely couldn’t understand and I didn’t feel like it met me at a reasonable place so what I’d like to see is not just an App Engine for poets but a Jaikou for poets in other words something that a person who wants their own micro blogging system can run through step through step by step and create their own Jaik ou another one is the Leconica for poets and my friend Ken Sedgwick fellow Berk leyite has got an incredibly good start on that and that is something I hope to participate in in the next few weeks I hope to have that going and and then you’ve got basically competitor to this hypothetical Jaikou for poets in other words it’s time to stop thinking about these servers as being things for geeks and start thinking of the bathroom for people with ideas and then you’re gonna then we’re really gonna see an explosion also also think about designers when you’re doing this so far designers have had played no role in the development of micro blogging think about it Twitter doesn’t have a way for somebody to set a template like blogs did and so think about how you can involve designers in this as well and and then once all this is done where we’ll be is where I think we need to be which is and where more and more people realize we need to be you know this happens early in every technology that we end up relying on a technology company too much and but it’s at first it makes perfect sense because we don’t understand the technology so we need somebody to set it up for us and make it simple but then that has its downside because we end up being controlled by them and they may be taking us someplace where we don’t want to go and so then the users break out and they do it on their own it happens all the time it happened in the PC software era with copy protection it happened with networking with the web you know the big technology companies of the day were trying to create them the real network that everybody would use and for while it worked we use their networks until we realized what we really wanted was to not have any technology companies at all controlling us and you know and then it happened it happens all the time as part of the cycle of technology well if this cycle with Twitter is like every other cycle when there’s no reason to believe it’s not there will come a point in time where we’re going to want to operate our own Twitter’s and the easier it is to do it the sooner that is going to come and the more growth we’re going to see as a result of it so consider EC2 for poets my contribution to that process of let’s make this happen sooner rather than later and so that’s and then I guess the last part of the road map is a very personal one I want to be able to create software that runs shrink wrap software that runs in the cloud and so I needed to show people how to do this so that I could then ship products into the space and interestingly once you’ve installed or at least interesting to me that once you’ve installed the the image that’s called for in EC2 for poets you now have a copy of my opml editor running and it’s listening on the it’s it’s a web server which means it’s listening on port 80 not that everybody knows exactly what that means and there is a command in the miss menu MISC menu called tool catalog and if you select it you’ll see a list of things that you can install so there’s a news river aggregator there’s the Twitter calendar which archives the tweets your tweets and the tweets of the people you’re following and there are many many other things in there and there’ll be more over time first I need to catch my breath and some of you guys now it’s your turn to get busy hopefully a bunch of people will try this out over the weekend and into next week and ask questions if you hit problems let us know what they are there are already quite a few EC2 people who know they’re way better than I do around the EC2 because I’m still very much a newbie in this cloud business and they’re gathered around and we’re sort of waiting to see what will happen so I hope you give it a try and that’s about it thank you very much for your attention and see you real soon all over the web okay bye bye