I met Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA, at the Palo Alto stop of the AWS Start-Up Tour. Tom gave the audience a good introduction to their CloudTest product, an on demand load testing solution which resides on and runs from Amazon EC2.
Tom wrote to me last week to tell me that they are now able to simulate over 500,000 users hitting a single web application. Testing at this level gives system architects the power to verify the scalability of sites, servers, applications, and networks in advance of a genuine surge in traffic.
Here are a few of their most recent success stories:
Hallmark tested their e-card sites in preparation for the holiday season, and are ramping up testing to over 200,000 simultaneous users using CloudTest.
Marvel Entertainment is doing extensive cloud testing in order to get ready for the release of the sequel to IronMan.
A division of Procter & Gamble is using […]
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The EC2-powered Voter Guide is a very powerful and helpful site, as well as a handy illustration of why scalable cloud computing is the perfect solution for short-term sites which have the potential to draw a lot of traffic.
Designed by E-thepeople and produced in conjunction with over 100 local newspapers and TV stations, the site was designed to improve civic participation in US elections using internet technologies.The site makes it easy to find the races in each area, compare the candidates, evaluate other ballot issues, and then record and print choices in ballot form for election day.
After an address is entered, the site creates a customized voter's guide. Based on my home address, my voter's guide contained 23 items — some candidates, some initiatives, some propositions, and a few amendments. Each page (representing a single item) contains a summary of the item in question and a side-by-side comparison of […]
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Imagine if I can have all pleasures of window shopping without stepping out of my warm and cozy home. Not having to worry about the cold winter or always-increasing-gas-prices or even wasting my precious energy.
Introducing Amazon's Windowshop.com. You can use the power of your fingers (and arrow keys) to move and browse through best-selling Amazon.com products in different categories. Even see a cool preview of a movie or listen to a sample MP3 song by just hitting the space bar on the keyboard. You have to see it to believe it.
The tool shows all best-sellers and new releases in Books, Music, Video, Video Games categories. Also, there is a very interesting chronological aspect that drifts the older content slowly to the right as new fresh content is pushed every Tuesday!
Let me tell you why I am excited about windowshop.com. It's because Amazon's Windowshop is fully powered by Amazon […]
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My colleagues and I have spent the week building up anticipation for this post on Twitter. After you read this post I am sure that you will agree that the wait was worthwhile.
The hallways at Amazon have been buzzing with excitement of late. After working for years to build and to run our line of highly scalable infrastructure web services we are happy to see that developers large and small are putting them to good use.
Here's what's happening today:
Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone.
There's now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2.
Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2.
Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2.
We plan to release an interactive AWS management console.
We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.
Let's take a look at each of these items in turn.
Production - After a […]
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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;
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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