Amazon Web Services Blog

News from ETech

Alex Iskold has written a very lucid summary of Werner Vogels' Etech keynote from earlier today. Of course, I agree with his summary:

AWS is continuing to impress. Amazon is now focused on amplifying the customer success stories and turning that buzz into more customers. Given the pricing and simplicity of AWS, it appears that it is not going to be long before a large percentage of small and medium size companies will be using one or more Amazon Services. Larger companies are likely to lag behind, mostly for political and branding reasons, so it will be interesting to see if this inflexibility will hurt them in the long run.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up, and (by the way) congratulations on all of your success with Blue Organizer.

Update: Phil Windley has another good summary.

-- Jeff;

Scalability Help Needed at Justin.tv

My friends down at Justin.tv are in the midst of a traffic surge that's only going to grow even more immense over the coming weeks and months. The front page of the site says:

Looking for someone to help scale the site STAT. Will seriously pay you a suitcase full of cash.

They are using EC2 and S3 and doing all of the right things, but when you are streaming live video to thousands of viewers 24x7, there's always room to improve. I suspect that someone with expertise in TCP/IP tuning would be a life-saver for them right now. They are located in San Francisco and local help would be the best.

You can contact them through their Twitter page, or send me an email (awseditor@amazon.com) and I will pass it along to them.

-- Jeff;

Powered by AWS Logos

If you have built an AWS application and want to dress it up a bit with the addition of a "Powered By AWS" logo, we've got good news for you.

Head over to our Co-marketing With Amazon Web Services page  and scroll down to Logo Program. From there you can download a Zip file with the logos (and some usage guidelines) inside. The logos are available in several sizes and formats.

-- Jeff;

Links, Links, and More Links

I'm attacking my inbox with a shovel; here are just a few of the things I found within:

• First off, Rich Lafferty enumerates the most expensive things at Amazon. Fortunately, the $40,000 Super Bowl XL Opus MVP Edition is available for free shipping. There are 3 in stock as I write this, so be sure to order soon!
• WeoGeo's WeoCeo product simplifies the management of Amazon EC2 instances. As the configuration file notes, "Utilizing a statistical reporting daemon on the WeoCEO clients, the WeoCEO server can calculate statistics on the overall system load. WeoCEO is designed to work in a homogenous networking environment, where each image launched is responsible for largely the same tasks."
• David Berlind asks, "Is it time to throw away your servers?" You will have to watch the video to see what conclusions he reaches. Entertaining and informative, not to mention colorful!
• Smartsheet.com is an innovative task, project, and process tracker that just happens to use Amazon S3 for storage and Amazon EC2 for processing. They are also using the Amazon Mechanical Turk to solicit suggestions for new types of project templates. You can find the HIT here.
• Blake Schwendiman wrote to tell me about his Instant Amazon gadget for the Google desktop and the Google Desktop/Sidebar.
• I'm not sure how to describe Justin.tv! Justin is wearing a video camera and recording every minute of his life, and posting the videos to this EC2-powered site.

-- Jeff;

AWS Gathering at ETech - Register Now

If you will be coming to the Emerging Technology Conference next week, we'd like to invite you to a special gathering of AWS customers. To register, send  an email to aws@amazon.com .

Other important ETech events include Amazon's Werner Vogel's talk about Building Scalable Infrastructure, which should go well with Don MacAskill's threat to Set Amazon's Servers on Fire. Don is asking for questions in advance, so feel free to read the SmugMug case study and then ask this real-live, heavy-duty customer what he thinks of our services.

We will have a show-floor booth, and we invite you to stop by, say hello, and pick up some cool new AWS Stickers.

-- Jeff;

Attention Massachusetts Developers

I'll be presenting to the New England VB Professionals Group in Waltham on Thursday, April 5th. Hope to see you there! If you'd like to meet on Friday, April 6 I still have some time open. Am planning to fly back out of Hartford, CT so anyone west of the Boston Metro area is welcome to email awseditor at amazon.com to set something up.

-- Mike

Two More Conferences

March and April is definitely conference season for us. Here are two more upcoming events:

• On Friday, March 23rd I will be judging the Under the Radar "Why Office 2.0" competition in Santa Clara, California. Registering through that link will entitle you to a $100 VIP discount.
• On Monday, March 27th I will be speaking and demonstrating some cool AWS applications at the SD Forum Application Platforms conference also in Santa Clara.

Hope to see you at one or (why not) both of these events.

-- Jeff;

Mounting Amazon S3 as a File System in Amazon EC2

We have a new article in our Developer Connection!

In Mounting Amazon S3 as a File System in Amazon EC2, AWS developer Bill Donahue shows how to use the S3InfiniDisk product to mount Amazon S3 as a file system in Amazon EC2. Using S3InfiniDisk, data written to a mounted Linux file system is written to S3, giving EC2 a permanent storage system.

The article covers starting an instance, installing the Java Development Kit, installing and configuring S3InfiniDisk, and more.

If you would like to write an article for the Developer Connection, take a look at our Co-Marketing page.

-- Jeff;

The Start-up Project - Seattle - RSVP Now!

On Thursday, April 26th, Amazon Web Services and the Madrona Venture Group will be co-hosting The Start-Up Project in Seattle. Running from 2 to 7 PM, this fast-paced event is designed for entrepreneurs, founders and leaders of start-ups and early-stage companies, and VCs.

We'll have a couple of hours of demos and presentations with plenty of time after that for networking and wine tasting!

Attendance is free, but you need to RSVP so that we know you'll be coming. To learn more and to RSVP, visit the Start-up Project - Seattle page.

-- Jeff;

Webmail.us

AWS user Bill Boebel of Webmail.us will be presenting at the upcoming ISPCON conference in Orlando, Florida. Bill's talk will cover the use of Amazon S3 to create a successful email archiving service. Here's the official description:

With the advent of utility-based services such as the Amazon Web Services S3 Storage Grid, new applications and economics are emerging that enable point solutions and services when coupled with an API such as S3. In this session, we'll review some of the examples and uses of this technology and delve into the experiences of deploying a large-scale commercial service.

If you plan to be at the conference, be sure to check out Bill's session.

-- Jeff;