Early this week I wrote up an overview of Amazon's web services offerings and posted it here. This included information about Amazon S3, EC2, EBS, and a bit about SimpleDB and SQS as well as information regarding how Fedora has been integrated with these services thus far, and where we might consider going. Discussions with the team during the newly started architecture meeting helped add several ideas to the list. In conjunction with this, I also ran some simple tests with EC2 using instance storage, EBS, and S3 as storage behind Fedora to see how the various storage types compared performance-wise. It turned out that the best performance came from EBS, then instance storage, followed after a while by S3.
My other focus this week was around an issue that has come up a couple of times regarding the updater in GSearch. In the default installation scenario GSearch is installed into the same Tomcat as Fedora, and Fedora starts the message broker on startup. Unfortunately, if the Tomcat server happens to start GSearch first, it's not able to connect to the message broker. To get around this the Fedora messaging client (which is used by GSearch) now spawns a thread to do the connection and performs several retries if the first attempt is not successful. This allows GSearch to let Fedora start and get the broker going before connecting. As a side note, testing this out required using a separate Tomcat to run GSearch, so it verified the ability to run GSearch external to Fedora.