Amazon Web Services Blog

Special Opportunity for Qualified AWS Developers in Seattle

I get to meet all sorts of interesting people in my position. Many of the meetings start out very casually and then evolve over time. I met Brad Hintze at the first Mashup Camp  and was immediately intrigued by his somewhat vague description of his employer's product. Since then, Brad has done his best to keep me in the loop as the product has come together within a veritable cone of silence.

So, what are they building? I'm not ready to spill all of the beans just yet, but I can say that they are working on some very intriguing tools which should simplify and streamline the process of building and deploying powerful, Ajax-style web applications and which might happen to call one or more SOAP or REST web services and/or deal with raw XML data. I've seen it, and it works as advertised.

Later this month, a few lucky Seattle-area developers will have the opportunity to see what I am talking about!

If you are an individual developer, part of a small company, or part of a small development team at at larger company and you are using one of more of Amazon's web services, then you may be eligible to partcipate. On the 28th of November, there will be a free Seattle-area training and focus group session for the product. You will receive full training on how to use the system, and you'll have plenty of opportunities to provide feedback. You will also get individualized, hands-on attention from the development team, and you will have the opportunity to qualify for free application hosting for all or part of 2007.

Sound interesting? Are you actively using AWS? Do you have the time and the inclination to participate?

If so, send an email to Brad -- his address is bradhintze@gmail.com.

-- Jeff;

Interesting way to use EC2, SQS, S3 together : Webmail.us

Backing up data to Amazon's Secure Storage S3 has been the hot-favorite-use-case for many companies. Webmail.us, the email hosting company, who is currently serving more than 27,000 businesses and hosting more than 350,000 paid mailboxes and growing by close to 10% per month, is now using amazon S3 for backing up encrypted email data.

Smart Guys at Webmail took AWS to next level by using all these services together. Its very interesting to know how creatively they used EC2, SQS and S3 together to scale out, save time and money. They used SQS to queue up their "cleanup" jobs and EC2 to process the jobs concurrently.

Webmail has a backup policy to keep user data on Amazon S3 for 14 days. After 14 days, the magic happens :

Every night, 35,000 "cleanup" jobs to-be-processed gets queued up in SQS. Jobs are fed to hungry EC2 instances one by one. Using the power of parallelism, 3,500 jobs gets processed over 5 EC2 instances in less than 40 minutes. They save 160 minutes by using 5 instances (imagine if they launch 10 EC2 instances!). Plus, there are two more advantages :

• Spawning more EC2 instances will allow them to scale out and process a higher number of jobs (in future) in the same amount of time.
• Cleanup happens at a remote location without sucking up any of their server's bandwidth

-- Jin

A New ISV Business Model

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud continues to impress the people who matter most: software developers (in this instance, an ISV).

Genexus is an innovative software platform that enables non-technical business people to rapidly build out applications--including an online presence. Andres Aguiar, their chief architect, sent me a note yesterday to say "We have GXPortal running in EC2. It took us one day to make it work. The site is running a beta of the next GXPortal version, on Java/MySQL".

There's an exciting new business opportunity for ISVs: create software that enables businesses to run in an environment without a dedicated data center! In essence, an environment where you throw your servers away! It's a bit different than the traditional ASP model that has been around for a while now, in that the customer has total control over (and is responsible for) their own server; however they do get to eliminate all that muck known as the expense and hassle of a physical data center. It's highly unlikely that any business will be able to operate their own center for less than $0.10 per hour!

-- Mike

Watch The Buzz!

Just a quick reminder that we are now collecting and taggging articles related to AWS on del.icio.us using the user name awsbuzz.

If you visit http://del.icio.us/awsbuzz on a regular basis (or, even better, pick up the RSS feed) you will be fed with a constant stream of information about what's going on with AWS.

Can't miss articles today include Jeff Bezos' New Thing in Business Week and When Workers Turn Into Turkers in the Christian Science Monitor.

-- Jeff;

Avoiding a Success Disaster

For a while I have been using the term "success disaster" to characterize what can happen on the web all too easily. What's a success disaster? You put up a piece of content somewhere and you get ready to handle a reasonable number of downloads.

Being the creative person that you are, however, links to your content shows up on Digg and Slashdot the same day that you are written up on TechCrunch. Suddenly the whole world wants in, and unless you've been Slashdotted before, you have no idea how to respond. Your basic assumptions about server capacity, network traffic, and data transfer limitations have just been blown out the window.

Getting more hardware to address this peak demand is probably not the right thing to do. All that traffic will  go away just as quickly as it came, and you don't want to raise your monthly burn rate just to accomodate these infrequent peaks in demand.

You need a shock absorber to help you deal with this transient surge in attention.

Think of it this way. If 200 of your closest friends suddenly showed up on your doorstep and said that they'd be hanging around for a while, you probably wouldn't drop everything and build an extension to your house. Instead, you would use an on-demand resource, in this case the nearest hotel, to handle this (hopefully transient) need for more room.

The folks over at the Spanning Sync Blog found themselves in just this situation a few days ago. After putting a new video online, traffic surged and they were saturating their server's network connection. They quickly moved the video over to Amazon S3 and the downloads proceeded very smoothly. In fact they served up over 6,000 11,726 copies of the video in just one day - more info in the comments.

For more information, read their post: 5,000 Video Downloads. Time for Amazon S3.

-- Jeff;

Shopping For Real: Amazon Web Services in Second Life

A few weeks ago, as reported on my personal blog, I was interviewed within and about Second Life by a pair of reporters for the Second Life Business Magazine. The new issue was released late last night and I wasted no time downloading it and looking for the resulting article!

If you would like to read it, simply download the PDF and then skip forward to page 71.

Needless to say, I think that there are many ways for  AWS developers to bring their existing skills to this new world and I look forward to seeing even more cool examples of what can be built within Second Life.

What most developers don't know is that there's a very powerful event-driving scripting language inside of Second Life. Any object can respond to clicks and other events with just a few lines of LSL -- the Linden Scripgt Langguage. As a starting point, you may want to look at the LSL tutorial or the LSL Wiki. I've written some scripts of my own, including the Elevator Script.

Need I even remind you that you should email me if you build something cool in Second Life using AWS?

-- Jeff;