"HelloWorld" Facebook Application AMI

I was quite curious to see how facebook applications can be built which use Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 so I spent some time creating a "HelloWorld" facebook application that lists your Amazon S3 objects given the bucket name (basically integrate Amazon S3 libraries with Facebook libraries). I bundled up my code/configuration and created a Public AMI so that facebook developers can simply re-use my configuration and host their app in Amazon EC2.

AMI ID: ami-74f3161d
AMI Manifest: aws-facebook-app/image.manifest.xml

This Amazon Machine Image is pre-configured and ready-to-go for hosting your Facebook Application. There are some simple steps listed in our Resource Center Public AMIs page that will help you get started.

So now you have solid scalable infrastructure to back you up, innovative facebook platform to play with and all you need is the Killer Idea!

If you think this is helpful, let me know through comments. We could extend this AMI and build an Auto-Scaling module around the app so that we can simply "Auto-Scale Facebook Applications" out of the box and never worry about servers when you get famous overnight.

Thoughts?

--Jinesh

Comments

[Paul Morriss]

I think this is a great idea. Now all I have to do is work out how to make money out of it, so that I can cover the cost of the EC2 instance. Auto-scaling would be good too, as that is what makes EC2 different, from what I've seen, and what is a real problem with successful Facebook apps.

[frederic sidler]

what do you mean by auto-scaling module ? and where does it stand ?

[Jinesh]

Hi guys, thanks for the response.

frederic, Amazon EC2 has a web service interface - that means you can effectively provision a medium state server by a remote procedure call. By Auto-scaling, I meant, we can look at "sensors" (load on the webserver, CPU utilization etc) and make an educated guess of how many more servers we need to cope-up with the demand. Ofcourse database will not scale this way. We can build this module that will automatically scale-out your facebook app from App-server level.

Paul, I agree monetizing your app is important. Amazon FPS usecases (one-time, multi-use, recurring/subscription, prepaid, postpaid, marketplace) might be a place to get few ideas.

Jinesh

[Mike]

Wow - this definitely got me off the fence (I had been putting off playing with the Facebook API because I was unsure what to do about hosting). The new Flexible Payments Service also looks like it might be a good fit for the Facebook ecosystem. Has anyone heard what (if anything) Amazon is doing to improve database support?

[zd]

I know that is has been awhile since your post, but I just discovered it. Autoscaling as you mentioned would be much appreciated!