Following the AWS announcement on Asia Pacific region support CloudBerry Lab team is working on adding new region support into the product. The newer version of CloudBerry Explorer is due to be released by Monday May, 3 2010. All our existing customers will get an update notification when newer version becomes available.
With this release you will be able to create new buckets in Asia Pacific region and configure Asia Pacific region as a default location for new buckets.
Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer for Azure 1.1 and later.
It has been awhile since we introduced CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob storage and now we are proud to announce a new release with new features among which Development Storage and $root container support. Those features turned to be the most requested by our customers and we would like to thank you those of you who brought it up.
With the release 1.1 we are also introducing CloudBerry Explorer PRO for Azure.
Development Storage
Development storage is a local implementation of Azure storage that gets installed along with Azure SDK. You can use it to test and debug your Azure application locally before deploying your app to Azure. The newer version of CloudBerry Explorer allows working with the Development Storage the same way you work with the online storage.
All you have to do is to check Development Storage check box and the fields will get populated with the build in account information.
$root container
$root container is a top level container in Azure Blob Storage account.All other containers are basically created within this top level container. With the newer release of CloudBerry Explorer you can work with $root container just like with other containers.
PRO version
With the release 1.1 we are also introducing the PRO version of CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob storage. It will have all the features of CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO but designed for Azure Blob storage. CloudBerry Explorer PRO for Azure will be priced at $39.99 but for the first month for the readers of our blog we are offering an introductory price of $29.99. To claim your discount, go to CloudBerry Explorer PRO for Azure purchase page at http://www.shareit.com/product.html?productid=300380289and enter the coupon code APR20AZURE.
Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 2.0 and later.
In CloudBerry Lab we strongly believe that command line interface makes any tool so much more powerful. CloudBerry S3 Explorer supported Windows PowerShell ever since the versions 1.0. Over the last year and a half we have been gradually improving our PowerShell command line interface by adding and optimizing commands. In this release we have added quite a few new commands, the most notable of which the commands for generating Amazon S3 signed URLs and CloudFront Private Content URLs for both HTTP and Streaming distributions. The full list of new commands with examples is available here.
In this article however we would like to introduce you to the so called PowerPack for PowerGUI. PowerGUI is a freeware IDE for PowerShell development similar to Visual Studio for C#. It is extensible with so called PowerPacks and the community has provided hundreds of PowerPacks for various technologies. CloudBerry Lab decided to make it easier for PowerGUI users to explore the capabilities of Amazon S3 command interface and released an Amazon S3 PowerPack as a part of 2.0 release.
To download PowerGUI go to their website at http://www.powergui.org/If you don’t have it already.
To install CloudBerry Explorer Amazon S3 PowerPack Run PowerGUI and go to File | PowerPack Management. Click Import.
Select C:\Program Files\CloudBerryLab\CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO\CloudberryAmazonS3.powerpack (for the default installation path). See CloudBerry PowerPack in the list.
Now you can see CloudBerry Amazon S3 PowerPack in the tree.
Click S3 Connection to enter your Amazon S3 Access Key and Secure Access Key. Check out here to find out how to get the keys.
Click on Connection Settings to specify proxy settings if you work behind the proxy server
The list of the bucket will appear in the panel to the left. Now you can browse your S3 storage by navigating the items in the tree. The right panel will display the actual objects in the bucket.
As always we are looking forward to your feedback and we are eager to hear where you want to take the PowerPack in the future, e.g. what features would you like us to add to it. We would encourage you to take it even further and implement your own PowerPack based on the functionality of CloudBerry Explorer snap-in. http://www.powergui.org/ runs regular developer contests with prizes for the best PowerPack and you can surely take part!
Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 2.0 and later.
In this blog post we will demonstrate an optimization that we added to our sync feature. In the previous version of CloudBerry S3 Explorer we do request header for each file on s3 to get original date modified. It used to make the user pay extra money to Amazon because of the number of requests (equals to number of files on s3).If you let’s say have 70 000 files on S3 that you want to sync, every time sync feature runs it would run a head request 70 000 times.
In the version 2.0 we are adding an option "Compare Content", which is ON by default.
The option calculates MD5 checksum for each file on a local computer that has a matching file on s3. Then it compares the MD5 for local file and ETAG (the MD5 check sum calculated by Amazon when the file is uploaded to s3)
If the ETAG is different we are looking for Date Created (the date of file uploading) and compare to local Date Modified. If local date modified is newer than Date Created on s3 we do not do additional requests for this file and upload it to s3 storage.
If local date modified is older than Date Created on s3 we do request for headers for this file and look into Date Modified stored in our header.
This way we can significantly minimize the number of requests to Amazon S3.
Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.9 and later.
Eucalyptus is an open source software framework for cloud computing that implements what is commonly referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Eucalyptus software provides users with the ability to run and control isolated collections of virtual machine instances with many EC2/S3-compatible tools.
Walrus is a storage service included with Eucalyptus that is interface compatible with Amazon S3. Walrus allows users to store persistent data, organized as buckets and objects. We are proud to announce CloudBerry Explorer support for Walrus.
Full description of installation / configuration of Eucalyptus is outside of this article scope, and we suggest that you check out Eucalyptus website for more details.
To register your Walrus accounts go to File | Walrus Accounts in the program menu. This will open the dialog you are already familiar with. You will have to specify Service Point, Access and Secret key and click ok.
For the Service Point take the IP address and the port number of your Eucalyptus installation and add /services/Walrus to the end. Don’t use http:// at the beginning. You should have something like this:
10.10.15.149:8873/services/Walrus
Note: This is a default Service Point and it could be modified using Walrus config files.
To find the connection data login to your Eucalyptus Management console and whole on the Credentials screen scroll down to Query interface credentials section. Click Show keys button. Basically Query ID is Access Key and Secret key is what it says.
Your new Walrus account will become available in the list of other accounts. Now you can create buckets and copy file to / from your Walrus account just like you would to Amazon S3 account.
Note: It is worth mentioning though that Eucalyptus used to provide a test bed for those who wanted to explorer its functionality not installing the software locally. Due to the popularity of the test bed the service is temporary unavailable as Eucalyptus team is moving it to more powerful hardware. I suggest that you visit their website later to check for announcements.
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