A simple Amazon SNS client in PHP
After reading the announcement for the new Amazon AWS product, Amazon SNS (Simple Notifcation Service) it seemed like a great idea, though there is as yet no PHP sample code provided.
If you've not seen it, it's a cloud notification service - it allows creation of "topics" (think a mailing list / channel) and management of subscribers to the topics. Interestingly subscribers don't have to be just email - they can be http / SQS subscribers too. However, I'm most interested in the email functionality.
I've written a simple client in PHP which I've put on github - you can get it here. Please note, it's about an hours work and doesn't include any error checking at all...but it works.
Enjoy.
Amazon AWS announces versioning for their S3 service
Amazon AWS have just announced a new addition to their S3 simple storage service, versioning. After you apply for the beta program, you'll have the ability to enable versioning on a per-bucket basis, rather than per item.
Versioning will save you from accidental deletion of files and enable a few other interesting possibilities - there is even a new feature which prevents deletion of items with out a multi-factor authentication token (much like an RSA SecurID), which should be nice for accountability & preventing accidental / malicious removal of items by staff.
The announcement from Amazon themselves reads like this:
We are pleased to announce the availability of the Versioning feature for beta use across all of our Amazon S3 Regions. Versioning allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object in an Amazon S3 bucket. Once you enable Versioning for a bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects any time you perform a PUT, POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request.
Some further reading at Amazon's proposals, AWS forum announcement