django-dynamodb-sessions is ready!

After much tweaking, hand-wringing, and thumping around on staging,django-dynamodb-sessions is ready. The package provides a super-high-scalability session store for those hosting on Amazon’s EC2.

This may be useful to you if…

You’re wanting to trim your DB size, or reduce the read/write thrashing that happens with DB-backed sessions. You also don’t feel like maintaining Redis, or something similar.

With the introduction of Amazon’s DynamoDB, we now have a very fast, massively scalable data store that is somebody else’s problem to secure, update, and keep running. I’ve found the response times to be great, especially when combined with the provided cached_dynamodb backend (similar to Django’s cached_db backend).

This probably isn’t a good option for you if…

• You aren’t hosting on EC2. While it’s still possible to use, YMMV as far as response times go. Within AWS, the response times are excellent.
• You’re not at a big enough scale to find yourself with a ton of django_sessions table bloat, or the previously mentioned read/write thrashing in django_sessions.
• You store massive (>1MB) amounts of data in sessions.

Getting Started

If you’d like to give django-dynamodb-sessions a try, either grab it with your choice of easy_install, pip, or other equivalent, or snag it from its page on PyPi. Install instructions can also be found on the PyPi page.

If you think this is interesting…

Make sure to Watch  the project on GitHub. If there’s enough interest, I’ll continue to tweak and improve the package.

PyATL Jam session this Tuesday

PyATL is having a Jam Session this Tuesday at 7PM, for those inthe area and interested. In addition to a presentations for getting started with a few web frameworks (Django, Bottle), there will be some hackage on various projects. I’ll be there, looking to help people with, or work on boto.

If you’re interested in coming, RSVP on the Meetup page. If you’re wanting to hack on, or get help with boto,  shoot a tweet at me and let me know so I can be ready for you.

boto 2.2.0 has landed, bringing DynamoDB goodness

To top January up, boto 2.2.0 has been released, bringing in, amongstother things, DynamoDB support. See the full release notes for the nitty-gritty. Feedback is actively being sought for the DynamoDB module, so please do open an issue on the tracker if you run into issues or have suggestions.

Also, we’re making a ton of progress on the documentation front. If you’d like to help, check out the documentation issues in the tracker, and/or hop in #boto in FreeNode. We’re in need of people familiar with various boto sub-modules to step up and contribute their knowledge, or give their respective module’s tutorials/api references some love.

Help improve Boto’s documentation

There has been a good deal of progress made towards getting boto’sdocumentation up to snuff. We’ve been working on cleaning up what is there, and have even added some new content (like the new DynamoDB tutorial). However, there is much left to be done.

We would greatly appreciate some outside eyes on this. We’d love to see what you think we could do to improve the boto documentation. Please feel free to visit the boto issue tracker and fire away. If you mention @gtaylor in the body of your issue, I’ll be sure to get it, and can label and route it.

For the ambitious

If you’re feeling particularly motivated, we’d love to have your pull requests. The boto documentation is all in  reStructuredText, compiled by the excellent Sphinx. You can expect to be reasonably productive with about 30 minutes of peeking at the Sphinx documentation and looking at what we have.

In particular, we need tutorials covering some of the modules we lack tutorials for. If you know any of these modules pretty well, please consider throwing something our way.

Boto and AWS, sitting in a tree

On a post in the Amazon Web Services blog yesterday, AWS hasannounced that it has brought Mitch Garnaat (maintainer of the excellent Boto) on board:

[…] Building on this model, Mitch Garnaat has also joined the team. Mitch has been a member of the AWS community for over 6 years and has made over 2,000 posts to the AWS Developer Forums. He is also the author of boto, the most popular third-party library for accessing AWS, and of the Python and AWS Cookbook.

Great news, but what are they going to do with Mitch, and what will his involvement with Boto be?

Boto will continue to exist as an open source project and we will be making official contributions to it.

They go on to list a few related job openings, one of which is a Python engineer (AWS Developer Resources). This looks, to me, like a great “official” endorsement of Boto and Python. As someone who uses Boto (and Python) extensively for work and play, this looks exciting.

A big congratulations goes out to Mitch, for nabbing a great job, and for being able to work on Boto within Amazon directly.