Amazon Web Services Blog

Speaking in Second Life on Dr. Dobb's Island

I will be giving an AWS talk in Second Life on Friday, November 30 at Noon PST.

The talk will take place at the amphitheater on Dr Dobbs Island. This will be a genuine "talk," with streamed audio, so make sure that your speakers are working!

I am planning to talk about web-scale computing, the Amazon Associates Services, the Elastic Compute Cloud, the Simple Storage Service, Simple Queue Service, and the Mechanical Turk.

-- Jeff;

Amazon S3 POST Support

The Amazon S3 team is looking for feedback on their proposal to support browser-based file uploads. This feature will allow developers to build web-based applications which support upload of local files to Amazon S3 without the need for an intermediate server.

If you are interested in helping to shape the definition this feature, you should definitely read the proposal and then visit this thread to let them know what you think.

-- Jeff;

Two New Positions in Luxembourg - Apply Today!

We have openings in our Luxembourg office for a web services evangelist and a business development manager. You can apply via the link on the job description, or (if you act fast) you can attend the Luxembourg Working Worlds Job Fair in Second Life on November 28th. Amazon personnel will be on hand to talk about the positions and to take applications.

These positions are based in Luxembourg. The evangelist will be expected to travel throughout Europe as needed.

If you would like to know more about the evangelist role, you may enjoy the description I wrote a while ago.

If all goes according to plan I will also be on hand for part of the day (I am traveling and connectivity isn't something I ever take for granted).

-- Jeff;

New Version of Bungee Connect, with Amazon FPS Support

My friends over at Bungee Labs have just rolled out a new version of their web-based Bungee Connect development tool. New features include better ways to manipulate field, class, and function definitions, a statement completion control, and support for the Subversion revision control system.

Bungee Connect is currently in "early access" beta mode. You can sign up (for free) and start using it here.

They have also introduced a library to simplify the task of calling the Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS) using the Bungee Logic language. As you can read in Brad's blog post, the new library is based on the REST version of the FPS API. The library handles a number of low-level details including the actual creation, signing, and issuance of requests, along with processing of the results.

Brad wrapped each FPS function and set each one up to return a Bungee object as the function value. He used the FPS WSDL file to define all of the relevant types and then added a few of his own for good measure. All of the interesting details describing how he did this are laid out in his blog post.

Using this library it is easy to make FPS calls such as Pay, Refund, and GetTransaction. The library also supports the Amazon co-branded UI pipeline with utility functions to construct the URLs needed.

-- Jeff;

PS - Part 2 of my recent interview with them is now available in podcast form. Part 1 can be found here.

AWS Start-Up Challenge Finalists

We received an incredible number of submissions for the AWS Start-Up Challenge!

We'd like to offer our congratulations to all seven of the finalists and we'd also like to thank everyone who submitted an entry. The quality, creativity, and diversity of thought present in the entries was beyond impressive.

In the next couple of weeks we will post a video for each finalist. You will then have the opportunity to vote for your favorite start-up. The finalists will be coming to Amazon headquarters in Seattle next month to present their entries to our judges and to attend the awards dinner.

After multiple rounds and levels of deliberation, we are pleased to announce that the following entries have made it to the final round:

Ooyala developed a platform which provides viewers with high quality interactive video with non-intrusive advertising. Their ad system uses computer vision and machine learning to deliver a targeted advertising experience.

 

Justin.tv operates a massively scalable live video platform using AWS. The custom-built Python Media Server has been written from scratch to perform optimally on lightweight EC2 instances. The end result is that live video publishers have a free, easy to use, and completely scalable platform for hosting any type of live video broadcast.

 

WeoGeo creates a one-stop marketplace for mapping using EC2 and S3 services. It supplies surveyors, engineers, cartographers, and scientists with the ability to conveniently store, search, exchange high-resolution CAD and GIS mapping products. Mappers easily list their data for sale and researchers quickly find the data they need.

 

Commerce360 uses advanced mathematics and statistical analysis as part of their ClickEquations product to optimize campaigns across the entire search chain and to deliver improved campaign efficiency and performance.

 

Brainscape, a product of the Neuroinformatics Research Group, is an engine for measuring the networks in the brain.  Researchers are using Brainscape to discover new brain networks and measure the effects of new drugs in clinical trials.  Soon, doctors will be using Brainscape to diagnose disease and aid in treatment.

 

MileMeter will offer "auto insurance by the mile," so people who drive less pay less for insurance.  By rewarding reduced driving with lower insurance costs, insurance by the mile has the potential to reduce  environmental impact and to make insurance both more fair and affordable.

 

UserTesting.com will provide quick and cheap access to a network of pre-screened testers who are articulate and observant and who meet specified demographics. Website owners can request that one or more testers attempt to complete a task on their website.

 

-- Jeff;

Tokyo Linux User Group Meeting on Amazon Developers Island

The Tokyo Linux User Group will be conducting a combined real-life / Second Life meeting this weekend.

Lars Kotthoff will be giving a presentation on a Ruby script he has developed for backup using Amazon S3 . The presentation will be given in English.

The Second Life portion of the meeting will take place in the Conference Center on the Amazon Developers 1 Island at 9 PM Second Life Time (that's the same as Pacific Standard Time) on Friday, November 9th.

If you are in Tokyo you can attend this meeting in person on November 10th at 14:00 JST at the following location:

Cerego Japan Offices
Ninomiya Bldg, 4F
18-4 Sakuragaoka-cho
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan

I will be on the island for the duration of the talk and hope to see you there. If you have any trouble finding the island, please send me an instant message from within Second Life. My avatar name is Jeffronius Batra.

-- Jeff;

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2

Earlier today, Red Hat announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL for short) is now available in beta form on Amazon EC2. 

This agreement unites Red Hat's network management, technical support, and application library with the on-demand scalability of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, allowing customers to create robust, reliable systems which can easily respond to uneven or spikey usage patterns. There's even more info in the FAQ.

The product is now in private beta, with a public beta planned for later this year. The base price is $19 per month, with hourly charges of $0.21, $0.53, or $0.94 for Small,  Large, and Extra Large EC2 instances, respectively. If you'd like to be part of the public beta you can sign up here.

We are excited to be working with the folks at Red Hat to bring even more options, power, and flexibility to our developer community.

-- Jeff;

Coming to Portugal

Are you a developer based in Portugal? I'll be in Lisbon on 13 November for the Codebits conference. I'll be there a day early (12 November) if you'd like to meet for coffee, or have me brief your team on Amazon Web Services, etc. Simply add your request to the AWS Evangelism Wiki at http://evangelists.wetpaint.com/page/MikeCulverEuropeFall2007.

Look forward to meeting you!

-- Mike

Notes From Berlin

Another post from the road… In this case the “road” is a three-week trip to Ireland, Germany, Portugal, and Canada before returning to Seattle. This week I’m in Berlin for Web 2.0 Expo and Interop; both are under one roof.

Today’s announcement that we’re launching Amazon S3 in Europe has me really excited, given where I’m posting this entry from. You can guess what the #1 request from developers has been on this trip: “When will Amazon S3 host data in the EU?”. Developers in the United States were also asking for S3 in Europe, because they were looking for lower latency. Of course the requests for hosting in the EU are as old as the service itself—and checking off a top developer request makes the Amazon S3 product team as happy as the customers who asked.

To support Europe we enhanced Amazon S3’s API to include a new parameter for locality. The name of the parameter is LocationConstraint, and if you use it then buckets are created in the location you specify. Existing applications will not be affected, and will create buckets in the United States, because that’s the “default” behavior. Pricing is slightly different in Europe; although not but much. Use the AWS Price calculator if you want to estimate what your costs will be.

ISVs Already Support Amazon S3 in Europe
Existing ISVs who built products on top of Amazon S3 have been effusive. For example, Saurabh Dani from Bucket Explorer said "We built Bucket Explorer as a simple and easy to use, yet powerful Interface for S3. The majority of our customers represent three segments: people looking to use Amazon S3 as an online collaboration tool, as a reliable store for off-site backups, or as a content delivery network. And our EU customers from all three segments expressed the need for an EU node of S3 to keep their data confined to the EU. With the integration of Bucket Explorer with S3/EU, we are very excited to be able to address to our customer needs." The latest version of Bucket Explorer can be downloaded at www.bucketexplorer.com/be-download.html.

Bucket Explorer and a popular Firefox add-in known as S3 Organizer (available at www.rjonna.com) have enhanced their products to enable users to specify whether buckets are created in North America or Europe. Of course you’ll need to download the latest version in order to take advantage of this new feature.

Real-World S3 Examples
The launch of S3 in Europe is one entry in a long list of milestones. To me, real-world implementations are always the most interesting. One really interesting example that demonstrates the power of scale on demand is in a recent blog post by software developers who work for the New York Times.

The post is about their project to convert old newspaper articles to PDF format for access online (check this out by searching for ”Titanic iceberg” on the front page of the Times, and choose the 1851-1980 archive in the drop-down box). From the blog: “[I] determined that if I used only four machines, it could take some time to generate all 11 million article PDFs. But thanks to the swell people at Amazon, I got access to a few more machines and churned through all 11 million articles in just under 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances, and generated another 1.5TB of data to store in S3. (In fact, it worked so well that we ran it twice, since after we were done we noticed an error in the PDFs.)”

Wow…

Mike