We rolled out a powerful new feature for Amazon S3 in the final hours of 2008.
This new feature, dubbed Requester Pays, works at the level of an S3 bucket. If the bucket’s owner flags it as Requester Pays, then all data transfer and request costs are paid by the party accessing the data.
The Requester Pays model can be used in two ways.
First, by simply marking a bucket as Requester Pays, data owners can provide access to large data sets without incurring charges for data transfer or requests. For example, they could make available a 1 GB dataset at a cost of just 15 cents per month (18 cents if stored in the European instance of S3). Requesters use signed and specially flagged requests to identify themselves to AWS, paying for S3 GET requests and data transfer at the usual rates — 17 cents per GB for data transfer (even less […]
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You are invited to join the Amazon SimpleDB team on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 9am PST for the first session of our new Developers’ Forum. During these once monthly webinars, developers will hear from the technical experts behind SimpleDB, and have the opportunity to engage in live Q&A.
Interested developers may register by emailing simpledb-developer-forum@amazon.com. Please include name & AWS account ID. In addition, developers are encouraged to pre-submit any questions they may have, to allow for a more thorough response during the live webinar. For those struggling with the development of a new application, sample code and a description of the intended application may also be submitted for review and discussion.
The team is looking forward to speaking with developers on the 20th.
– Jeff;
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AWS is a finalist in two categories of the Crunchies awards, Best Enterprise and Best Overall.
In addition to that, AWS-powered applications from Animoto and SlideRocket are candidates for Best Design; eBuddy is up for Best International; DropBox for Best New Startup of 2008; and Twitter (competing with AWS) for Best Overall.
If you could take the time to vote that would be great! Here are some direct links to make it really easy:
Best Enterprise - AWS
Best Overall - AWS
Best Overall - Twitter
Best Design - Animoto
Best Design - SlideRocket
Best International - eBuddy
Best New Startup of 2008 - DropBox
– Jeff;
PS - If I missed any AWS-powered applications, drop me a note and I’ll update this post!
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I'm Simone Brunozzi, technology evangelist for Amazon Web Services in Europe.
This period of the year I decided to dedicate some time to better understand how our customers use AWS, therefore I spent some online time with Stefan Fountain and the nice guys at Soocial.com, a "one address book solution to contact management", and I would like to share with you some details of their IT infrastructure, which now runs 100% on Amazon Web Services!
In the last few months, they've been working hard to cope with tens of thousands of users and to get ready to easily scale to millions. To make this possible, they decided to move ALL their architecture to Amazon Web Services. Despite the fact that they were quite happy with their previous hosting provider, Amazon proved to be the way to go.
Overview of the new ArchitectureThis is how their new architecture looks:
1. Soocial Web application: Nginx running […]
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Lots of people responded to the
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There’s now a new and somewhat easier way to write SimpleDB queries.
In addition to SimpleDB’s existing query language, you can now use select statements which look very similar
to standard SQL (Structured Query Language). We made some
small changes and additions to the language in order to accomodate SimpleDB’s unique multi-valued attribute model.
Here are some valid select statements:
select * from mydomain where city = ‘Seattle’
select * from mydomain where city = ‘Seattle’ or city = ‘Portland’
select * from mydomain where author not like ‘Henry%’
Things get even more interesting once multi-valued atttibutes are used. This query returns the
items where the only attribute value for keyword is ‘Book’:
[…]
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Twilio founder Jeff Lawson stopped by Amazon headquarters yesterday for a show and tell session. Twilio provides a simple yet powerful way to build highly scalable telephony applications. Of course, Twilio itself runs on Amazon EC2 and stores data in Amazon S3.
A Twilio application is simply a phone-activated web application. When the application's phone is called, Twilio answers and activates the application. The application then returns an XML document containing TwiML (Twilio Markup) commands. Jeff showed up how Twilio's 5 commands (<Play>, <Gather>, <Record>, <Say>, and <Dial>) can be combined to create applications in minutes.Here's what they do:
<Play> is used to play an audio file for the caller. Twilio will transcode the file in real-time, turning high-quality audio into the required 8 bit 11 kHz format.
<Gather> accepts one or more digits from the caller's keypad and passes them to a specified URL using POST or GET.
<Record> captures the caller's voice […]
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I've got some new resources to help you make better use of the Amazon Simple Queue Service, or SQS.
First, our new Stock Quote Example shows how SQS can be used to build a scalable and reliable stock quote system. The user specifies a list of stock symbols, and the application
retrieves quotes for these symbols from a financial web service. The sample illustrates how SQS adds reliability and scalability with minimum effort. It also shows how SQS can be incorporated into a Visual Studio component for easy development and reuse. The component fires a ResponseEvent when a new quote is available, enabling the creation of a clean, event-driven user interface. The code includes an adaptive polling mechanism which minimises SQS calls (and costs) when there's no work to do, while maximizing throughput when there is work to be done. The application includes a benchmarking feature to illustrate the efficiency improvements […]
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Steve from MindTouch emailed me a while back about a really interesting write-up on how they moved their Wiki farm to Amazon EC2.Steve said that “in the spirit of helping others do the same, we did a complete write up about it.”
The article includes an architecture diagram, but more importantly it also drills into implementation details–complete with configuration settings that they used for HAProxy, Apache (with multi-tenant Deki), Memcache, and Lucerne. MindTouch also implemented auto scaling, which is covered briefly.
If you’re thinking about architecting an application for Amazon EC2, there’s nothing like seeing someone else’s implementation, which you can read about here.
Oh, and one of my favorite features of MindTouch’s wiki software is the “Save to PDF” feature. Made it easy to print out the paper.
Mike
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You can now launch Amazon EC2 instances in Europe!
We've created a new region for Europe, separate and distinct from the existing region in the United States.For fault tolerance, data separation, and stability, each EC2 region is an entity unto itself; issues within one region won't affect the other one. This means that Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), security groups, and SSH keypairs must be created anew in each region. We're working on tools to make it easy to move this information between regions. Also, as we learn more about how customers use multiple regions, we will add APIs to make it even easier for them to do so. There's a new Feature Guide to Amazon EC2 Regions with a lot of helpful information, including some Frequently Asked Questions.
With the exception of support for Microsoft Windows and for Amazon DevPay (both of which will be ready before too long), every feature […]
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