We are proud to announce that today we will be pursuing our vision as a part of Facebook. If you were a Spool user, please read the instructions on retaining your bookmarks.

We are extremely excited to accelerate our vision and help Facebook’s users connect and share with the people in their lives. We wouldn’t be in a position to have this sort of impact without our supporters and the Spool community. Please accept a heartfelt thank you for supporting us and for affording us this opportunity.

Sincerely,
The Spool team

We’ll let you know of our post-Spool plans as soon as we have something to announce. Stay tuned!

Amazon S3 is a extremely powerful service at the core of Amazon Web Services. However, outside of a production environment, S3 can be challenging to work with. It involves passing keys around, provisioning user accounts, and a reliable network connection — not to mention it costs money.

At Spool, we built Fake S3 to make working with S3 in development and testing environments much easier. Our goal was to make a self contained executable that can mimic the majority of S3 Rest API with few external dependencies.

For development, each engineer runs her own instance of Fake S3 where she can put gigabytes of images and video to develop and test against, and her setup will work offline because it is all local. We also have a continuous integration setup that is running tests 24/7 (often against large video files). Fake S3 saves us $1000 a month in bandwidth alone for our tests. In both development and testing, the time saved in not waiting for assets to go back and forth into AWS, especially our larger media files, makes Fake S3 very useful.

We’re releasing Fake S3 as a gem on github. It’s an early release and we’ll keep improving it. If you have ideas or issues, please contribute to the project!

Installation

gem install fakes3

Running

fakes3 -r ~/fakes3_root -p 10001

Example Client Code

require 'rubygems'
require 'aws/s3'

include AWS::S3
AWS::S3::Base.establish_connection!(:access_key_id => "123",
                                    :secret_access_key => "abc",
                                    :server => "localhost",
                                    :port => "10001")

Bucket.create('mystuff')

('a'..'z').each do |filename|
  S3Object.store(filename, 'Hello World', 'mystuff')
end

bucket = Bucket.find('mystuff')
bucket.objects.each do |s3_obj|
  puts "#{s3_obj.key}:#{s3_obj.value}"
end

Bucket.delete("mystuff",:force => true) # Delete your bucket and all its keys

In general clients can work if you can specify a host and port to connect them, as well as forcing path style requests (instead of subdomains.) Subdomain style S3 requests can work, but it involves adding your bucket names into /etc/hosts (ie. s3.localhost or mybucket.localhost) or using dnsmasq if you have a large number of buckets.

Simulating Network Conditions

Another useful feature is the support for simulating network conditions. You can run fakes3 with bandwidth limiting enabled like so:

fakes3 -r ~/fakes3_root -p 10001 --limit=50K

This will limit your GET request bandwidth to 50K/s per request instead of instantly off of your local machine. This is very convenient, for example, to simulate how mobile devices would behave in the real world.

Related Tools

Fake S3 is great for development and testing due to its simplicity, but is not intended to replace S3 in production. If you want to replace S3, there are other tools such as Ceph, ParkPlace (supports bitorrent), Boardwalk (S3 interface in front of MongoDB), and RiakCS that you can check out.

We’re very proud to announce that we’ve raised $1 million in outside financing for Spool. Our complete list of investors is below.

Though we’ve only been in private beta for 3 months, we’ve seen tremendous growth and received an overwhelmingly positive response. We have raised money to continue building a product our users love and are humbly looking forward to the opportunity to do so. We’ll be investing heavily in improving SpoolBot, polishing our mobile and browser applications, making the product easier to use for new users, and making it easier to share content with your close friends.

In the mold of great businesses we admire, our goal is to efficiently use our outside investment to improve the lives of millions of users. To this end, we have selected investors who have experience investing in the highest growth technology companies (Google, Twitter, Facebook, and more), who have themselves founded or built world changing companies (YouTube, Palantir,  LinkedIn, and more), and entrepreneurs who have relevant experience outside of technology companies as well.

We have some big things in store for Spool and are looking forward to sharing them with you. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback — please don’t hesitate to email us at feedback@getspool.com.

-The Spool Team

Our Investors

• SVAngel
• Felicis Ventures
• Start Fund
• Charles River Ventures
• Vivi Nevo
• Steve Chen
• Elad Gil
• Deep Nishar
• Kevin Donahue
• Joe Lonsdale
• Bill Lohse
• David King
• Nils Johnson
• Matt Ocko
• Raymond Tonsing

In case you’re wondering how to save to Spool via email, read this post

As always, if you have any questions, please email us at support@spoolbot.com

SpoolBot is experiencing tremendous load right now. We apologize but it may take a bit longer than normal to get your recordings as SpoolBot makes its way through the backlog. We’ve increased the number of SpoolBots by 5x to handle the increase in traffic and are adding more by the minute.

Thanks for your patience! We’ll working very hard right now to find ways to get you your recordings as quickly as possible.

- The Spool Team

You can now send an email with a URL or an attachment to your personal SpoolBot email address. SpoolBot will put the contents of up to 5 URLs or any number of attachments into your Spool account!

Add your Spool to the contacts on your phone/tablet

Find your personalized email address in settings