PiCloud
Amit Saha
http://echorand.me/2012/08/17/pyconau-2012-talk-on-picloud/
Intro
Commercial cloud service
“Worker process” oriented rather than hosting oriented
20 core hours per month included in free account
Python API “import cloud”
REST API for more general access
Transfers dependencies automatically
Pre-initialised with NumPy/SciPy
Can tailor requested compute resources to a particular workload
Can run in a mode that uses multiprocessing locally rather than the cloud
Example
cloud.call
is the most basic API!
Also the candidates you would expect, like cloud.call
(problems with the video demo failing to display properly - sorted out by using a different player)
(My comment: you could probably map a concurrent.futures executor to this API pretty easily)
IPython notebook provided in repo for talk (see link above)
Other capabilities
Directed-acyclic graph of job dependencies (to pass data between jobs, map/reduce, etc)
Persistent data: cloud.files API to move data to/from the cloud and update it in jobs
More compex example: pyevolve
Shows automatic deployment of dependencies
Identifies and pushes Python files that are referenced locally
Retrieves CSV files created pyevolve
Publishing APIs via REST
Can designate a Python function to expose as a REST API
Environment
Automatic deployment only works for pure Python modules
Environments let you tailor what it is installed - non-Python tools - extension modules - Ubuntu-based
Management APIs
Query job status, list jobs, etc.
Resources
More links! (again, see link at top)
Q & A
Any other services like this? (Don’t know)
Security - SSH authentication
My Comments
Looks pretty interesting. Definitely aimed at the scientific crowd rather than the webhosting crowd, thus the different emphasis and “worker process” style API.