Today we launched Nice Nice JPG, a Vanilla Ice image placeholder service. I've been a dedicated Placekitten user for years but wanted an excuse to write my own, and I had that stack of Vanilla Ice pics filling my hard drive, so it seemed like a good choice. In the end, though, this really was/is an exercise to prove out the value of Amazon's new OpsWorks service in our development shop. Initial thoughts are VERY positive: it sits nicely between the type of experience you'd have on Heroku and the full hosted or EC2 experience. You get some control, but not too much. We'll be deploying our next major content platform on OpsWorks for sure.

So... check out NiceNiceJPG (http://nicenicejpg.com) and check out AWS OpsWorks (https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/02/18/announ...).