Amazon Web Services Blog

Start filling up your Shopping Cart with AMIs

Amazon EC2 allowed developers to create and bundle their software into Amazon Machine Images - Pre-packaged Pre-configured Filesystem. Developers were then able to share their AMIs with friends and family (no kidding) and even with the general public.

Now with our brand new "Paid AMI support", they can set their own price and earn perpetual commission. This adds a whole new business model to Amazon EC2.

For example, A Ruby on Rails Developer can now configure the entire stack (Nginx, Apache, Mongrel, MySQL and all the open source goodies that "simply works"), set its price, say $0.15 cents/hour and $0.12 /GB-up and $0.21 /GB-down and fire away. While Amazon EC2 gets the same old traditional $0.10/hour, $0.10/GB-up and $0.18/GB-down, the developer (AMI-creator) gets the difference (in this case, $0.05/hour, $0.02/GB-up, $0.03/GB-down) credited back to his account from whomever who instantiates that image.

The AMI-creator can set any price for the AMI depending upon the software that is loaded or as compensation for the work and time he has put onto making it and AMI-consumer simply purchases the AMI just like he purchases more tangible items from Amazon.com.

Now lets think a little harder to see what can we do with it. Imagine all the possibilities. You are more than welcome to brainstorm (in the comment section of this post). A few that come to my mind are:

• Monetizing 'Software As A Service' - John Doe has a web app (say CRM software, Blogging Software) that consumers, in the past, used to install, configure, optimize. Now it comes "factory-installed". John can deploy and create a Paid AMI, run some numbers and set the price and consumers can simply pay for the "service" over and above the hosting charges.
  
• Monetizing your Configuration Setup - John Doe has provided some migration, automation and upgrade utilities over and above already configured Apache-Tomcat.
  
• Monetizing your Optimization Setup - John Doe has developed a smart hack that bumps up performance for Rails/Tomcat/WebSphere in a particular configuration setting or configured and opmitized instances that work as a MySQL cluster.

More ideas are always welcome!

--Jinesh

More Trips Coming Up...

Mike, Jinesh, and I have been maintaining a pretty hectic travel schedule, flying here, there, and everywhere to talk about the Amazon Web Services.

We are already putting together our schedule for the fall of 2007 and the spring of 2008 and our calendar is filling up fast.

If you run a user group and would like us to address your group, or if you are a corporate or individual developer and just want to talk shop, please feel free to examine our Evangelist Wiki and to sign up for a time slot on one of our upcoming trips. Once you do this, be sure to send a confirming email to evangelists at amazon.com with full details.

You can also find a listing of possible trips on the same page. We are more than happy to travel almost anywhere, and you can make this happen.

If you have a lot of good contacts in your area, you can even book us for an entire day and then do finer-grained scheduling throughout the day. This worked out really well for me on my most recent trip. Steven Livingstone-Perez invited me to Glasgow and then kept me busy the entire day. I had several good meetings, a working lunch, and then an evening presentation at Strathclyde University.

-- Jeff;

New Amazon ECS Release

We're excited to announce Amazon ECS version 2007-07-16. There are several changes from previous versions, outlined below:

• This release introduces two new response groups: VariationMatrix and VariationOffers
  1. The VariationOffers response group enables you to retrieve the offers for the children of a parent ASIN. VariationOffers is a child response group of the Variations response group. VariationOffers differs by not returning item attributes for individual variations.
  2. The VariationMatrix response group returns, for a given parent ASIN, the variation dimension name and value of each child ASIN. If a returned item does not have variations, the VariationMatrix response group will not return any data.
• This release introduces a new operation: TagLookup.
  TagLookup enables you to find items, guides, and Listmania lists using tags. A tag is a word or phrase that a customer on Amazon’s retail website associates with one of these entities. For example, a customer might tag a given entity with the phrase, “BestCookbook.
• ItemLookup, ItemSearch, and CustomerContentLookup have three, new, optional parameters.
  All three operations can now accept tag-related parameter values to find items based on tags. The input parameters, TagPage, TagsPerPage, and TagSort, help retrieve and organize tag-related response elements.
• This release introduces tag-oriented response groups.
  The new, tag-related response groups are: TaggedGuides, TaggedItems, TaggedListmaniaLists, TagsSummary, and Tags. Using these response groups, you can retrieve tag information for items, guides, and Listmania lists. Tags and TagSummary specify the amount of information returned. The other tag-related response groups, TaggedGuides, TaggedItems, and Tagged ListmaniaLists, specify the kind of entity tagged.

As always, aws.amazon.com has complete release notes and documentaion.

-- Mike

Attention Venture Capitalists

A couple of us in the office were chatting about VC portfolios. As we talked, we realized that several firms have asked us to speak to their portfolio companies--sometimes as a group, and sometimes one at a time. So we're extending the offer to all of you. If you want your member companies to learn more about Amazon Web Services, email evangelists at amazon dot com and we'll make it happen.

Of course the offer is always extended to other groups as well. Never hurts to check the wiki at evangelists.wetpaint.com to find out if we're already planning a trip to your area. It's surprising how many places we visit...

-- Mike

See you in the UK?

I am just about set for my next UK trip, but there are still a few open issues:

1. I have an appointment labeled "Lunch at Wagamana" on the 19th, but no other details. Please add details to the Wiki page or send a note to evangelists at amazon.com .
2. I have some open time in Oxford on the 25th and would be happy to meet with any interested developers. I am also planning to attend the Oxford Geek Night.

-- Jeff;

PS - I am pretty much full-up for this trip, but I have another European trip coming up in late September. Please feel free to add yourself to the Wiki and to send a confirming email to evangelists @ amazon.com .

Amazon EC2 Helps Justin.TV Take on E3

Yesterday morning we received an email from the folks behind Justin.TV. They were preparing for a big splash at the E3 show and wanted to make sure that we were in a position to handle the increased load. We assured them that we were.

Justin and his posse visited E3 and did a live broadcast (available in archive form here). Everything worked really well.

After the event, they shared some impressive statistics with us. At peak they served up 3,500 simultaneous video streams representing over 1 gigabit per second of network bandwidth. Within minutes of noticing the heavy load, they were able to increase their streaming capacity by over 400%, and they paid only for the server capacity that they needed. Once the load subsided they killed off the extra capacity.

That's how it works when you are Web-Scale!

-- Jeff;

Renkoo's Booze Mail: EC2, and the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster

My friends Adam Rifkin and Joyce Park are the co-founders of Renkoo. Renkoo simplifies the process of getting together with a bunch of friends for an event or simply for a tasty beverage or two.

Last month Adam told me that they were planning to launch a Facebook application and that they wanted to host it on Amazon EC2 in order to accommodate what they hoped would be a rapidly growing user base. I got him signed up for the beta and their application (Booze Mail) launched just a few days ago. Using this application you can send a virtual tasty beverage -- anything from a simple glass of water to a throat-scorching Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster -- to anyone on your Facebook friends list.

As Adam explains, "With the pressure of rejection removed from the situation, a sender can make offers to deepen friendships without trepidation." This is where things get even more interesting. The recipient of the virtual drink can redeem it (by printing out an "IOU" style coupon) or by using Renkoo's scheduling facility to organize an actual, face-to-face meeting.

People are sending around virtual drinks at an ever-increasing rate and they've been using EC2 to good advantage. Looking at the Appaholic traffic graph I see that the user base has grown from less than 100 at the end of June to over 13,500 as of this morning. I don't know how many EC2 instances they are using, but I do know (because they told me) that they aren't too nervous about growing. As Adam says:

"Thank goodness for EC2. Otherwise this would be making me very very nervous because we have no hardware, rackspace, or bandwidth that can handle where I think we're going."

Instead, they are able to focus on the features and functionality of their application.

Congratulations to Adam and to Joyce on the launch!

-- Jeff;

PS - Feel free to add me to your friends list if we've met....

Second Life Developer Chat Schedule

Here is a schedule for the next month or so of AWS chats in Second Life. I will be traveling in the UK later in the month but should be able to participate in the chats from the road. I will do my best to send out announcements in advance of each chat.

• Thursday, July 5th, 8 AM PDT (15:00:00 UTC).
• Thursday, July 12th, 10 AM PDT (17:00:00 UTC).
• Thursday, July 19th,  6 PM PDT (01:00:00 UTC).
• Thursday, July 26, 10 AM PDT (17:00:00 UTC).

We generally talk about EC2 and S3, but any and all talk related to the Amazon Web Services is definitely welcome. If you are a developer of an AWS-related tool or application and would like to discuss what you've done, please feel free to show up. Last week we had Doug Kaye of GigaVox Media in attendance.

-- Jeff;

PS - Colin Percival provided the UTC times shown above. He also let me know that the #aws channel on the EFnet IRC network is another, always-on, place to discuss AWS.