PiCloud Beta Release

[Ken Elkabany]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Jacob Shaw <shawjacob4 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>

Thanks for the compliments.

1) PiCloud will not automatically transfer libraries that require
python C++ extensions. However, in your control panel, you can upload
a tarball or synchronize an svn repository that contains your
extension's code and we'll automatically compile/install it on our
systems.
2) We are currently working on support for python 3.x (we've had
requests from a fair number of users), and plan to release a
compatible client library in a couple of weeks.

Ken