On Thursday, October 23rd, rPath will be hosting a cloud computing webinar at 11 AM PST.
Billy Marshall, founder and chief strategy officer of rPath will host. Guests will include Frank Gillette of Forrester Research, Jeff Schneider of MomentumSI, and I. We’ll talk about how cloud computing is closing the gap between development and operations, and we’ll show how organizations can capitalize on the promise of the cloud using a graduated and architecturally sound approach.
The webinar is free but advance registration is required. See you there!
– Jeff;
Read More…
Amazon S3 usage has grown very nicely in the last quarter and now stands at 29 billion objects, up from 22 billion just a quarter ago. As one of the S3 engineers told me last week, that’s over 4 objects for every person now on Earth!
Our customers are keeping S3 pretty busy too. To give you an example of what this means in practice, the peak S3 usage for October 1st was over 70,000 storage, retrieval, and deletion requests per second.
All of this usage drives increasing economies of scale, or (in plain English) lower costs. I am happy to say that, effective November 1st, 2008, a new tiered pricing model for Amazon S3 storage will go in to effect. The new model features four price tiers, with prices decreasing based on the amount of storage used by each customer. Here is a full breakdown:
Tier
US
EU
Description
0-50 TB
$0.150/GB
$0.180/GB
First 50 TB per […]
Read More…
I am in London for a couple of conferences and meetings. I arrived this past Sunday and have just about shaken off the jet lag. I have a whole bunch of interesting stuff in my inbox and some time to blog, so here goes.
First, we’ve extended the deadline for entering the AWS Start-Up Challenge to October 10th. If you haven’t entered yet, you still have a couple of days to come up with and submit your idea for the next great start-up.
Fellow evangelist Mike Culver has just produced a new screencast. In How to Create Requests (HITs) in Amazon Mechanical Turk, Mike shows how to create and run a survey using the web-based Requester tools on the Mechanical Turk site and how to approve and view the results, all in a 5 minutes and 13 seconds.
We have a lot of really nice EC2 AMIs on our site, but they’ve […]
Read More…
We’re getting ready to enable the use of Microsoft Windows Server on Amazon EC2 later this Fall.
You will be able to use Amazon EC2 to host highly scalable ASP.NET sites, high performance computing (HPC) clusters, media transcoders, SQL Server, and more. You can run Visual Studio (or another development environment) on your desktop and run the finished code in the Amazon cloud.
The 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows Server will be available and will be able to use all existing EC2 features such as Elastic IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and the Elastic Block Store. You’ll be able to call any of the other Amazon Web Services from your application. You will, for example, be able to use the Amazon Simple Queue Service to glue cross-platform applications together.
Existing EC2 tools will be able to launch Windows-powered EC2 instances. Once launched, you can use the Windows Remote Desktop or the rdesktop […]
Read More…
Amazon DevPay is pretty cool. It allows developers to use Amazon’s billing and account management to layer their own business models on top of Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. Developers using DevPay include SmugMug (for SmugVault), Wowza Media Systems, Red Hat, and SearchBlox.
Earlier today we rolled out a brand new release of DevPay. The new release has two important new features, lower fees and reduced risk.
How, you may ask, are lower fees a feature? Well, it turns out that many developers would like to use DevPay to simply pass their actual AWS charges through to their customers without marking them up. The new release makes this possible because the 3% DevPay fee is now charged only on the value added by the developer. There’s still a 30 cent fee for processing each payment.
The new fee structure will be of value to developers using DevPay on top of EC2 because […]
Read More…
Earlier this week we launched a revised version of the AWS web site.
The new site offers better navigation and easier access to the content related to each service. All of the relevant options and links are available in a series of convenient pull-down menus.
It is now much easier to find AWS news, events, and media coverage. Dedicated sections on the right side provide convenient access to information of interest to developers (including the once elusive AMI directory) and to business managers. There’s information about user groups (including some guidelines for starting your own) and an ever-growing set of case studies.
We also rolled out a series of AWS Quick Reference cards.
Available in PDF form, the cards summarize the most important data types, function calls, and command line tools for each service.
Cards are now available for AAWS, DevPay, EC2, FWS, Mechanical Turk, and SQS, with more to follow before […]
Read More…
We’ve been working with Oracle to bring a number of their products into the cloud. The first fruits of this work are now ready: cloud-compatible licensing, EC2 AMIs preloaded with a variety of Oracle products, support programs, backup to the cloud, and a cloud management portal.
As more and more enterprises take a look at the Amazon Web Services, they invariably ask about packaged software, particularly databases. With this announcement, AWS users now gain access to a commercial-grade, brand-name database, along with the necessary tools and middleware needed to build and host heavy duty enterprise applications in the Amazon cloud.
So, what’s available?
The Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager can now be licensed to run in the cloud on Amazon EC2. Customers can even use their existing software licenses with no additional license fees. Read more about cloud licensing here.
I should say a few words about licensing here […]
Read More…
We’ve got something new and cool in the works and I’m excited to be able to tell you a little bit about it today!
Before the end of the year we are planning to release a new service for content delivery. This new (and as yet unnamed) service will provide you with a high performance way to distribute popular, publicly readable content to your customers all over the world, with low latency and high data transfer rates.
The new service was designed to meet the following goals:
Allow developers and businesses to get started easily, with no dollar or volume commitments. Like our other services, this one will be pay-as-you-go.
Be simple and easy to use. In fact, a single API call is all that’s needed for you to start delivering your content.
Work seamlessly with Amazon S3, for durable storage of the definitive versions of your content.
Have a global presence, using edge locations […]
Read More…
It is time for one of my inbox-clearing blog posts once again. Here’s a bunch of cool stuff that you might like:
Benjamin Kudria just wrapped up an internship at the New York Times. He wrote a detailed recap of his experience and noted that he had the opportunity to use Amazon EC2 and S3. As he notes, "had never worked with AWS before, and I was amazed at how easy it was to have my managers agree to offload a pretty significant part of our functionality to Amazon’s servers. I ended up learned a lot about S3
and EC2!"
rPath will be sponsoring a Cloud Computing Meetup in New York City next week at the Westin in Times Square. The meetup will take place after conclusion of the AWS Start-Up event at the same location.
SubCloud is an enterprise file system implemented on top of Amazon S3 using FUSE. It has a rich […]
Read More…
As more and more developers look to put AWS to use in various ways, questions about security practices and policies come to our attention from time to time.
We’ve just published the first version of the AWS Security white paper. The paper provides answers to a number of questions about certifications, physical security, backups, and issues specific to particular services.
– Jeff;
Read More…