WarpShare™

Tarzan/CloudFusion, comments and an update

We’ve been very busy over the past few months.

The WarpShare™ service is taking a bit more time to prepare than we’d originally thought. We have lots and lots of cool ideas, but we can only build them a day at a time. There isn’t much else I can talk about at this point in terms of technical progress, but I wanted to pass along the info that WarpShare is still on the horizon and will be coming as soon as it’s a bit more cooked.

Thirteen months ago, we open-sourced a piece of software that we’d been building called Tarzan™. In the time since then, Tarzan has become quite popular and at times difficult to keep up. We’re doing our best, however. Tarzan 2.0.4 will be going out very shortly. This is mostly a bug fix release, but we cheated and added a couple of minor new features in this release as well. Keep an eye on the release notes for more detail on the changes.

Also, Tarzan is beginning to branch out a bit. Up until this point, Tarzan has been built specifically for Amazon’s Web Services stack but that will soon be changing. As AWS has become more popular, new projects have been created that allow you to run services like EC2, S3, and SimpleDB on your own servers with an API that is identical to AWS. Tarzan intends to begin unofficially supporting these services soon (2.0.4 is a start). We’ve also been looking at the Rackspace/Mosso stack and are considering supporting their cloud as well. We will continue to evaluate this as we free up some resources to work on it.

To better reflect this beyond-Amazon direction, we will soon be re-branding Tarzan as CloudFusion™. If you’re on the mailing list, you may have seen a previous announcement for the name “CloudCore,” but we didn’t do enough homework up-front and discovered that there is already a trademark on that name. Our close-second choice was CloudFusion, so we’ll be moving forward with that. Tarzan 2.1 will be CloudFusion 2.1 and will come with a refreshed website, documentation, examples, and other goodies that we’re trying to get built.

Lastly, we’re now supporting a technology called OpenID for comments. What does that mean for you? It means that you can sign-in and comment on our blog with your existing account from Google/Gmail, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Windows Live, Hotmail, Flickr, AOL, Blogger, WordPress.com, and others! We also intend to enable this technology to make registering for and logging into our upcoming WarpShare service as easy and painless as possible. Watch for that!

Look forward to more news soon!

Categories: Announcements, Tarzan, WarpShare and What we're doing

Tarzan 2.0.1 is now available!

I am happy to announce that Tarzan 2.0.1 is available for immediate download! This is a maintenance release that provides support for recent updates to Amazon Web Services, and is backwards-compatible with Tarzan 2.0 (and several of the pre-releases).

We know it hasn’t been long since our 2.0 release, but in that time Amazon has added support for European EC2 instances, SQL-like SELECT queries in SimpleDB, and they’ve recommended a new method for generating authentication signatures that provides better security. Tarzan 2.0.1 addresses ALL of these updates.

Because of the security enhancements in this update, we highly recommend Tarzan 2.0.1 for ALL of our new and existing users. Please see the release notes for more information.

Categories: Announcements and Tarzan

Tarzan 2.0 is finally here!

After 18 months of ongoing development, I am proud to announce the immediate availability of Tarzan 2.0! The Tarzan platform has complete support for six different AWS services (S3, CloudFront, EC2, SimpleDB, SQS, and Amazon Associates) and has been built from the ground-up to be fast, memory-efficient, easy to use, and easy to build on top of by providing a solid set of core tools for your (and our) web application.

You can download the 2.0 release from http://bit.ly/tarzan2, and please Digg us at http://bit.ly/digg-tarzan.

Categories: Announcements, Tarzan and What we're doing