Hell, it already feels like old news. As my previous entry testifies, last Thursday we started the day a little earlier than normal to begin preparations for going public with the service we've been building in secrecy.

It's immensely satisfying to finally be able to talk about what we're doing, and to be able to show it to friends. It's even more satisfying to have been directly involved in something that made it onto the front page of Reddit, Digg and Slashdot.

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is to computing what Amazon S3 is to storage. Both make it possible for anyone, from the lone programmer in his metaphorical garage, through small startups and all the way up to the big guys, to scale their computing resources dynamically (and in very close to real time) in response to their immediate needs.

What is EC2? In a nutshell you build a disk image that contains a fully functional operating system, along with all of your software, and then toss it into S3. At any point you can ask us to boot as many instances as you're prepared to pay for. Our aim is to be able to bring them up for you in a matter of minutes. When you're done with some, or all of your instances, just shut them down and stop paying for them. In some sense we're commoditizing the datacenter.

Combine it with some of our other web services (like SQS) and it's getting easier every day to build some pretty impressive systems.

What's been interesting is seeing who "gets it" and who doesn't. We spent a fair bit of time on Friday (in between answering questions on our forum) scouring the web for anything anyone had written about EC2. The guys in Seattle must have 24x7 web crawlers out there, judging by how quickly they found stuff. By the end of the day they sent us a "summarized" list of 49 of the most interesting blogs/sites discussing EC2. Quite a heady experience all told.

It's been quite a different experience building (and finally launching) a service like this. All my previous experience is much more product oriented and it's been great to see and be able to compare the two worlds. Each has their pros and cons and I think supporting this service is going to be a bit of both. One big positive is the immediacy of the feedback. This could easily turn into a big negative but I don't expect that to happen.

I haven't provided much detail here, in truth I still need to figure out what Amazon's blogging policies are, and I am only just coming down from a 5 day buzz. I can honestly say this has been one of the most stressful weekends of my life, but at the same time I wouldn't trade back the last week for anything.

I'll leave you with some of my favourite posts discussing Amazon EC2.

• "That is just cool..."
• Someone who gets it.
• The update at the bottom is a good example of the kind of benefit EC2 provides.
• Include a link to a RoR app running on an EC2 instance
• A screen by screen walkthrough (this guy had this up within hours of our launch, pretty cool)
• Someone else who gets it
• At the risk of repeating myself ... it's all about the platform in my opinion
• I just like the title
• And finally, one more person who gets it

It's on, biatches.

At this point in time we are rapidly (hopefully) approaching our launch date. This has been (as is so common in our field) pushed back repeatedly in the past, but if all continues as it is currently we should push the big red button at 6:30am on Thursday.

I own billing. This is a funny dark corner of what we're doing because in some respects it has seen the least amount of direct testing. This is largely because until you have a fully functional and thoroughly tested service you're generally fairly reticent to actually take money off someone's credit cards.

And the card issuers aren't really geared to make this kind of testing easy. There's no real notion of generic test cards that you can issue transactions against. After all, who would bear the cost? And would it be significantly cheaper to the (software) industry than finding creative ways to test without it?

But I digress. So billing is in some sense a latecomer to the fold. It's been around for a long time but has been this quiet little service in the background generating records that ultimately get posted as zero cost transactions.

At the same time, it's poised to step boldly into the limelight when we push said button, because at the end of the day, regardless of whether or not the service actually works, most people are going to be pretty adamant that they only get charged for what they use. In a nutshell, of all the components that make up your service, the one that people care about above all others is the one that ultimately reflects on their credit card.

Now billing has seen its share of testing. Intellectually I'm reasonably happy it's solid. My gut, on the other hand, has other ideas. I'm starting to get butterflies. There's a little nagging voice in my head questioning whether or not I've done enough testing; whether or not the testing I've done has been appropriate; just how much I've cocked up without realising it.

In truth, I could have done more testing. But isn't that always the case? Ultimately I have to make the decision that I've done enough testing, because there's always more on the queue of things that need to get done to get to launch. What worries me is the items on that queue that were preferable at the time to the next logical set of tests because they were more attractive, because they were easier, or even just because at the time they seemed like a larger fire.

Claire likened it to sitting an exam. That's a pretty good analogy. I always had those lingering doubts. Did I study enough? Did I spend my time in the right areas? I don't think I've ever walked into an exam completely confident that I've done everything that I could have.

All that remained was to take the test.

Proof, as if somehow it were needed, that the only difference between a first world country and a third world country is how you pimp your shit.

Along the sides of many of our roads you'll find "entrepeneurs" pimping someone else's shit. Amongst this rubbish you'll find the occasional, somewhat colourful, collection of faux leather bean bags. And when I say colourful, make no mistake I mean colourful. Everything from black through bright yellow and into shades of luminous green (that I suspect are pimped as a lime variant).

So it amused me no end, nay, I'll even go so far as to say it tickled my fancy, to notice the enclosed banner ad for, gasp, beanbags.

Admittedly, they're Sumo Lounge hightech bean bag furniture, made from the latest space-age materials, easy to clean and a boon for fans of static electricity. Hell, if you live in the right state they may even arrive complete with the model pictured in the ad enclosed (batteries not included). In fact who do you think you are trying to wear that excuse for a lifestyle solution without owning one two many of these?

In all honesty, when I first caught a glimpse of it while idly flipping between Firefox tabs looking for something to read, I thought I'd finally stumbled across a creative ad for a porn site. But alas, no, 'twas not the case.

And stop right now. Don't even try to figure out that connection. You'll just do yourself an injury.

I find myself resisting "reinsertion" after taking time off. Which is quite weird given how much I resist taking any time off. There's clearly a form of inertia at work.

Usually, time off involves forced withdrawal from most forms of connectivity. Sure, I have my cell phone around but that's never really been a form of connectivity for me. I gave up on GPRS pretty quickly and I don't have a 3G enabled phone. Oh, and I seldom answer the damn thing anyway, so all in all it hardly factors into "being in touch". Disconnected largely boils down to "sans Unterweb".

What I find after I get back from a break, is that I fight getting online for as long as possible. I avoid switching my machine on if I can help it and for days afterwards will avoid looking at my personal mail (work mail's a little harder to ignore :-P), or even browsing any of the sites I visit regularly.

I think it's because once you start you get swept away in it (I do, anyway) and suddenly you're having to run to keep up again. It doesn't seem that bad while you're in the thick of it but as soon as you stop and clamber out of the rapids it becomes quite obvious just how much effort you're expending just to stay the course.

I find myself being quite honest with the person currently occupying the role of Boss in my working life (Boss in other spheres is an entirely different role).

This is interesting because it seems to be a trend. Bear with me, this may take a little explaining.

Sometime after I broke up with my girlfriend of many years I found myself in a new relationship (as an unstable molecule like myself tends to). After a short while I realised that I was treating the relationship is though it were many years old. I was being brutally honest in a way that is only possible with someone who's extremely familiar with your quirks and has obviously decided you're worth tolerating regardless. It took an effort to reset myself and undo habits formed over the previous few years.

So, swinging back to the boss front, at Mosaic I was particularly 'open' with both of the guys who ultimately decided whether I was still worth Mosaic's time and effort. Extremely open. Open to the point where it still surprises me that they put up with me for so long :-)

It strikes me that I might be a bit of a creature of habit. It's taken very little time for me to approach a similar level of 'openness' with my new Master of the Daylight Hours.

I'm not sure if this says something about me, or if I've just had a run of particularly tolerant overlords.

We spent the weekend at the Henning farm. Numbers like those and what (other than farming) can you call it?

Not entirely spent at the Hennings. We drove through to the park for a few days, to spend time away from away and with my half-brother, Nicholas, and his girlfriend, Emma. The park is probably my favourite place on Earth. Admittedly, my sample set is small, but that part of the world takes some beating. The inset picture was taken at sunrise at a bird hide just outside of Skukuza, on Lake Panic. We sat there, wrapped in blankets to ward off the icy morning, and watched the lake wake up.

Just off the hide were a collection of about 30 Hippo, who did little initially beyond occasionally snort, but as the morning progressed became more and more active, before finally swimming off to the other side of the lake. Birds (my favourite aspect of my favourite part of the world) were in no short supply and we (or rather I) spent a large part of the few hours at the hide watching a yellow-billed stork hunt for frogs and fish in amongst what turned out to be a handful of crocodiles.

The rest of our break was spent back in Pretoria with the Hennings. I really like my second family. I think I scored twice with this little arrangement.

There are three things in particular that I enjoy about a break at the Hennings. The first is a near limitless supply of tea. The second is the opportunity to do nothing at all, with books. The third is the people (residents and migrants). It's an interesting mix of chaos and calm.

And to top the week off it snowed in Joburg today. The last time it snowed was about 25 years ago. I was small. Much smaller than I am now. I had hair!

It was sad to say goodbye, always is, but it had to happen. Armed with a bag of pistachio nuts and a new book by Neil Gaiman we boarded the plane for the return flight. It struck me for the first time as we came into CT international just how much the world looks like a plastic model from the air. I tried to look for the transition between plastic trees and reality as we touched down but couldn't quite pin it down.

And then home. To a fire, and connectivity, and our own bed.