PiCloud Beta Release

[Jacob Shaw]

On Nov 1, 5:13 pm, Ken Elkabany <K... at Elkabany.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> PiCloud has just released a Python library, cloud, which allows you to
> easily offload the execution of a function to a cluster of servers
> running on Amazon Web Services. As a beta product, we are currently
> free to all users who sign up with beta code "PYTHONLIST". To
> register, go tohttp://www.picloud.com
>
> Full service description:
> PiCloud is a cloud-computing platform that integrates into the Python
> Programming Language. It enables you to leverage the compute power of
> Amazon Web Services without having to manage, maintain, or configure
> virtual servers.
>
> PiCloud integrates seamlessly into your existing code base through a
> custom Python library, cloud. To offload the execution of a function
> to the cloud, all you must do is pass your desired function into the
> cloud library. PiCloud will then run the function on its
> high-performance and automatically-scaling cluster. We quickly scale
> our server capacity, both up and down, to meet your computational
> needs, and only charge you for the resources you actually consume.
> Getting on the cloud has never been this easy!
>
> PiCloud improves the full cycle of software development and
> deployment. Functions that are run on PiCloud have their resource
> usage monitored, performance analyzed, and errors traced; we further
> aggregate all your functions to give you a bird's eye view of your
> service. Through these introspective capabilities, PiCloud enables you
> to develop faster, easier, and smarter.
>
> Common use cases for our platform:
> * Crawling the web
> * Manipulating images and videos
> * Generating charts and graphs
> * Statistical/Mathematical analysis of data sets
> * Real-time data processing
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ken Elkabany
> PiCloud, Inc.

Wow, amazing service.  I used PiCloud for some scraping work, and my
script ran about 10x as fast.

Some questions though:
1) I have another project which uses a custom python extension written
in C++.  Is there a way to use it on PiCloud?
2) I noticed you guys only support python 2.5 and 2.6.  Will there be
3.1 support eventually?