Got an Hour? Create a Server in the Cloud

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Mar 222009

From the “keeping up with technology” department comes this: Got an Hour? Create a Server in the Cloud – ReadWriteWeb:

Dave Winer yesterday announced EC2 for Poets, a step-by-step guide to help you create a server on Amazon’s EC2. His how-to is so easy to understand that we had our own server up and running within the hour. Sure, it may not seem like much that this fairly uninteresting page is sitting out there somewhere, but for this writer, it was an amazing coup.

Dave Winer wrote the guide, whose working title was “EC2 for Poets“:

The goal is to make cloud computing less mysterious by helping people through the process of setting up a server on Amazon EC2. The title derives from a class that was offered at the University of Wisconsin, when I was a grad student there, called Computer Science for Poets.

I loved the idea then, and still do. Engineers sometimes mystify what they do, as a form of job security. I prefer to make light of it, so more people will be tempted to give it a try. It was easy for me, why shouldn’t it be easy for everyone?