Amazon Web Services Blog

What's the Difference Between Amazon FPS and Amazon DevPay?

We’ve heard from a few folks that it’s not clear what the difference is between some of the Amazon Web Service offerings. This is a very short post to try to clarify two services, plus a product feature. Like most short descriptions, I am short-changing the rich feature set of each offering. Visit aws.amazon.com for more information on each.

Using Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), developers can accept payments on websites. It has several innovative features, including support for micropayments.

Amazon DevPay instruments two Amazon Web Services to enable a new sort of Software as a Service. Amazon DevPay supports applications built on Amazon S3 or Amazon EC2 by allowing you to “resell” applications built on top of one of these services. You determine the retail price, which is a mark-up above Amazon’s base price. Customers pay for your application by paying Amazon. We deduct the base price plus a small commission; then deposit the rest into your Amazon account.

Amazon EC2 Public AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) are not a service as such. Rather these virtual server representations are a feature of Amazon EC2, designed with Amazon DevPay in mind. They are usually configured with your value-add software that you want to monetize using a monthly fee and/or markup above the base fee that Amazon charges. One of the best-known examples of a public AMI is Red Hat RHEL, which is available for a monthly fee plus an hourly fee. It’s fully supported by Red Hat, which makes the virtual version of their software viable for many companies who are Red Hat customers.

-- Mike

EC2 Firefox Extension is now Open Source

The very cool EC2 Firefox Extension is now an open source project on SourceForge!

The extension makes it really easy to launch and manage Amazon EC2 instances. After creating your keypairs and security groups, you can simply right-click on any of the listed AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) and choose to launch one or more instances.

All of your running instances are listed at the bottom where they can be identified, controlled, monitored, shut down, and so forth. You can easily capture the public DNS name of any running instance, and then paste it into your favorite SSH client (e.g. PuTTY, my personal favorite) to create a secure connection to your new EC2 instance.

 

There's also a very cool menu entry labeled "Launch more of these" for instant scalability (assuming, of course that you've built your application in a scalable fashion, a subject of another post).

As-is, the extension is pretty cool but as always seems to be the case with something cool, everyone who uses it has ideas for even more cool features. Some people seem to want a slightly less technical view and others want to go in the opposite direction. A lot of people would like to have more control over the list of displayed AMIs.

We've released the extension in source form and are now eagerly anticipating the results. The extension is written in JavaScript and you'll need to know a little bit about CSS and DHTML to be productive.

Let us know what you come up with!

-- Jeff;

Happy Holidays

Within our Developer Relations team at Amazon, any public picture of a team member is considered fair game for use in parodies. Look what just showed up in my Inbox:

Mike, Jinesh and I, would like to wish you some Happy Holidays and offer our thanks for reading (and responding to) our blog posts. We love to hear back from our readers.

-- Jeff;

PS - I should point out that this is a really fun place to work and that we do have some great job openings.

New Amazon Mechanical Turk Features...

The Amazon Mechanical Turk team has been hard at work on a couple of important new features: credit card funding and transaction history. Both of these features are available from the Your Account page.

With the debut of credit card funding, Mechanical Turk Requesters (the people and organizations who create the HITS) can instantly add funds to their accounts using a credit or debit card or from an existing balance in an Amazon Payments account. It is no longer necessary to  fund work using a bank account.

This new feature simplifies and accelerates the process of getting work done. Requesters can pre-fund their account at any level (the minimum is one dollar). Once this is done, the prepaid balance can be used to create and pay for work right away.

You now have access to your detailed transaction history from Your Account as well. You can check on your account balance and you can see the last 18 months of prepayments into your account and payments to workers. You can even download this data in CSV form.

-- Jeff;

Make Money Fast - Introducing Amazon DevPay

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you may recall my Ka-Ching post this past summer. In the course of announcing the Amazon Flexible Payments Service, I also tried to make clear the fact that we are doing our best to enable and encourage developers to build profitable businesses around our line of web services.

We are now taking another big step in that direction with the introduction of Amazon DevPay. This new service allows entrepreneurial developers to wrap their own business models around Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, taking advantage of Amazon's existing customer base and billing infrastructure. With DevPay, developers can focus on being creative and innovative while dispatching the less-than-glamorous aspects of dealing with bank accounts, credit cards, and so forth to us.

Developers use DevPay's web-based registration interface to create pricing plans for their applications, monitor customer signups, and track usage. The developer's customers use another web-based interface to sign up and enter payment information for the applications that they wish to use.

You can think of DevPay as an enabling technology for our other services. As as developer you will spend most of your time working with the other AWS services while counting on DevPay to allow you to monetize your hard work.

One thing that I really love about DevPay is the fact that it builds on years and years of work in a multitude of areas! We've been putting the building blocks in place for a long time. Starting from Amazon's early focus on providing customers with a great online experience, to the creation of our ever-growing line of scalable and powerful web services, we can now measure and bill Amazon customers for the use of applications built by our 290,000-strong developer community. We've taken what we know about creating a great online shopping experience and applied it to every aspect of DevPay, from the application registration and purchase pipelines to the user billing statement and the developer information dashboard.

Like all of our services, DevPay offers a lot of flexibility. You can create your own pricing plan for your EC2 AMIs or your S3 objects using any combination of one-time charges, recurring monthly charges, and metered Amazon Web Service usage. You have total flexibility to price your applications either higher or lower than your AWS usage.

DevPay includes a complete "pipeline" (series of web pages) for you to use as part of your application's sign up process. When your customers travel through the pipeline they will sign in to their Amazon account, choose a payment method, agree to the pricing plan and gain access to the application using a private identifier generated by DevPay.

Your customers will be billed for usage of their DevPay-powered applications on the first day of each month. We will then deduct a 3% fee plus another 30 cents, and deposit the remainder in your DevPay account. We will then charge your account for the usage of the Amazon services. You can transfer the profits (your DevPay balance) to your bank account whenever you want. You will also be able to log in to the DevPay portal to check on the status of your business at any point.

You can also use DevPay with your Amazon S3 applications. If your application adds value above and beyond raw storage (backup, indexing, personalization, or recommendations all come to mind) you can charge more than the base prices for storage and bandwidth.

You can adjust your pricing plan at any point if need be. DevPay even allows you to customize the email notification that will be sent to your customers when this happens. This is another way that our focus on customers really comes through, and it is one less thing that you will have to do yourself.

We've already got two interesting examples of DevPay in action...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now available on Amazon EC2 via DevPay. New users simply click the Subscribe Now button, agree to the payment terms, and have access to the RHEL AMIs in a matter of minutes. The monthly fees includes the ability to run the RHEL AMIs on EC2, a Red Hat Network Update Entitlement and unlimited email support with 2-day turnaround.

 

Zmanda Internet Backup is a plugin for the Amanda Enterprise backup software. Amanda Enterprise is a certified, tested, and supported version of the popular Amanda open source backup and recovery tool. Amanda can now use Amazon S3 to backup, archive and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Internet.

 

A number of other developers now integrating DevPay into their applications and I'll be blogging about them in the very near future. If you build a cool application with DevPay, send us some mail, leave a comment to this blog post, or write your own post with all of the relevant information.

-- Jeff;

A Place for Everything - Amazon SimpleDB

We are now accepting applications for the limited public beta of Amazon SimpleDB!

Amazon SimpleDB makes it really easy and straightforward to store and to retrieve structured data. You no longer need to worry about creating, maintaining, or migrating database schemas, monitoring and tuning the performance of your queries, outgrowing the storage or processing capacity of your database server, making backups, or replicating data.

Instead you simply create up to 100 SimpleDB domains (each of which can hold up to 10 GB of data, for a total of 1 TB) and then start to store structured data in the form of items. Each item consists of multiple name/value pairs (which we call attributes), and there can be more than one value for a particular name. You can have a different set of attributes for each item in the domain. With SimpleDB there is no need for a time-consuming schema change when you need to store additional information in your database. You simply store the additional attributes as desired.

For example, if you were building a tag cloud to represent information about a collection of web sites, you could store the site URL as the first attribute and the entire set of tags as the second. After the system has been running for a while, you decide to add a thumbnail for each URL (of course the Alexa Site Thumbnail Service would be perfect for this) and simply add a third attribute to the new entries. Later, as desired, you can go back and add this attribute to the older entries. This ability to improve your data model on a dynamic, as-needed basis makes Amazon SimpleDB a perfect match for today's fast-paced world of agile development, where flexibility and adaptability are of paramount importance.

I believe that the "new-age" model espoused by SimpleDB should cover about 80% of all database requirements. Applications which require long-running queries and/or complex table joins, such as those for data warehouse applications, are probably not a good fit for SimpleDB today. While RDBMS offerings provide deep functionality, for many use cases, they introduce more complexity (and more cost) than is necessary.  Many developers simply want to store, process, and query their data without worrying about managing schemas, maintaining indexes, tuning performance or scaling access to their data.

All data stored in SimpleDB is replicated multiple times in geographically disbursed data centers, so customer databases don’t need to be backed and will automatically fail over to another replica if one is not available. Our key strengths are availability, durability and scalability. Customers can make SimpleDB requests via HTTPS and they are also free to encrypt their data for additional security.

As the name implies, the SimpleDB API is quite clean and simple. Here is the entire roster of calls:

• CreateDomain creates a new named domain within the scope of your AWS account.
• DeleteDomain deletes a domain and all of the items within it.
• ListDomains returns a list of all of your domains.
• PutAttributes creates a new item (if necessary) and adds or replaces attributes.
• DeleteAttributes deletes one or more attributes from an item.
• GetAttributes returns all or specified attributes of an item.
• Query retrieves a set of items which match a query expression. Large result sets can be retrieved in chunks of up to 250 items.

The query language includes Boolean operations, lexicographic comparisons, and set operations.

As is the case with all of our web-scale services, you pay for exactly what you use in terms of bandwidth, storage, and processing, making it perfect for startups. SimpleDB doesn’t require any up front hardware investment or DBA skills.

Bandwidth is priced the same for all of the AWS services, 10 cents per GB for data flowing into the Amazon data center, and 18 cents down to 13 cents per GB for data flowing out, depending on volume. Query processing costs 14 cents per machine hour. This is slightly different than EC2 which is based on wall clock time rather than on CPU time. As an aid to understanding what this means in practice, the SimpleDB calls return the actual amount of machine time used by the call.

Want to learn more? Take a look at the SimpleDB Detail Page, the Developer Guide, the Getting Started Guide, and the FAQ.

Reaction from the online world has been swift, with good articles at Information Week, O'Reilly Radar, ZDNet,  Gigaom, TechCrunch, CNET, Read/Write Web, and Satine. Bloggers Deepak Singh and Don MacAskill have also weighed in. There's even more on the AWS Buzz.

We'll be letting developers into the beta program as fast as we can, so sign up today if you are interested in participating. We are really looking forward to seeing some SimpleDB applications emerge from our community in the very near future.

-- Jeff;

Help Wanted

The Amazon Web Services Developer Relations Group is hiring for some exciting positions in Seattle and Luxembourg. We've got the following openings right now:

• Developer Support Engineer (Seattle) - You’ll represent AWS to our customers as you handle direct inquiries, diagnose and troubleshoot technical challenges, and communicate to the customer within given time frames.  You’ll also work with Amazon engineers when their help is necessary to resolve customer incidents as expediently as possible.
• Director of Marketing(Seattle) - You will work across multiple teams to position our services, drive awareness, create demand, grow our developer community, and help launch brand new services. You must be comfortable with ambiguously defined problems, big challenges, quick changes, and balancing strategic thinking with tactical, detailed execution.
• Marketing Manager(Seattle) - In this role, you will have the unique opportunity to shape our web services strategy, messaging, and business. You will work across multiple teams to position our services, drive awareness, create demand, grow our developer community, and help launch brand new services.
• Software Development Engineer - Developer Resources (Seattle) - You'll be responsible for managing content and collaborationplatforms for Amazon Web Services, as well as producing developer content such as documentation, code samples, developer tools, libraries, SDKs,, and other resources that make it faster and easier to use our web services.
• Evangelist (Luxembourg) - You will generate grass-roots attention and support for Amazon Web Services among key industry opinion makers, journalists and technologists. The ability to identify, engage and win mindshare among third-party developers in target ISVs, systems integrators and collaborative technology providers is required.
• Business Development Manager (Luxembourg) - You will help to define key partnerships to target, establish those technical relationships, and manage the day-to-day interactions in order to build long-term business and marketing opportunities.

We also have a number of development, technical management, business, and even finance positions open across the AWS team. To learn more about these positions, start here and search using the keyword AWS.

-- Jeff;

Introducing the "Pay Now" Widget

The new "Pay Now" widget builds on top of the base-level payment functionality offered by the Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS) to make things very easy for web developers who would like to accept Amazon Payments on their site. Customers can pay by clicking on a Pay Now button or by selecting Amazon Payments as their payment method.

The widgets are really easy to set up and to use.

First, you need to set up an Amazon Payments Business Account. Business accounts are similar to Personal Accounts with the added ability to accept credit card payments. There are also Ultra accounts for businesses which consistently bill over $20,000 per month.

Next, you log in to your Amazon Payments account and choose the type of widget that you would like to create. There are three basic types:

Use the Static Button when you have just a few items and attributes (names and prices) with stable prices. Once you have generated a static button using our web form, you can simply paste the HTML directly into your site.

With this button type, the customer simply clicks on the button and is directed to the Amazon Payments page to pay.

 

Use the Dynamic Button when your needs are slightly more complex. Perhaps your prices or item descriptions change regularly, or perhaps you have lots of different items. In this case, you will generate custom buttons using a bit of server-side scripting, driven by your product database.

Like the Static Button, the customer simply clicks on the button and is directed to the Amazon Payments page to pay for their purchase.

 

Finally, use the Alternate Payment Method button when you would like to offer your users a choice of payment methods. Once again,a modicum of server-side scripting will be needed, this time to specify the available payment methods and the payment amount.

If the customer selects Amazon Payments, they will be directed to the Amazon Payments page to pay.

 

You will receive an email each time a user has made a payment and you can also see the payments by logging in to your Amazon Payments account. you can also use the FPS API directly; the GetAccountActivity function is a good place to start.

You can learn more about the widgets by reading the FAQ. The widgets use the Amazon Payments fee structure.

We are looking forward to seeing these new widgets used in all sorts of creative ways.  Feel free to link to your applications in a comment to this post, or send us an email.

-- Jeff;

And The Winner Is...

We capped off the AWS Start-Up Challenge with an award dinner at the W Hotel in Seattle and a good time was had by all.

Following a day-long session with the finalists at Amazon Headquarters, we adjourned to the W Hotel for the next phase. The 13 representatives from the 7 finalists participated in a series of "lightning round" sessions with venture capitalists from all over the country.

We (the judges) combined our own rankings with those from the online voting form and the venture capitalists and  we had out winner. After a sit-down dinner (punctuated with large-screen showings of the videos of each finalist), Amazon Senior Vice President Andy Jassy took the stage and announced that Ooyala had won the competition. We were all impressed by their management team and with their Backlot product. Here are the happy winners (Sean, Belsasar, and Bismarck):

After Andy made the announcement he presented them with a special coveted and highly sought after"golden hammer" signed by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. He invited them to "take a hammer that server right there" (after donning safety glasses, of course). The resulting video is quite entertaining:

There are more pictures on All Things Distributed (Amazon CTO Werner Vogels' blog).

The local press was out in force. John Cook of the Seattle Times wrote about Pitching VCs for cash at Amazon's challenge and noted that more than 900 companies entered the challenge. Brier Dudley noted that Sean of Ooyala is from Gig Harbor.

Seattle entrepreneur and blogger Marcelo Calbucci blogged about the event and and predicted that "A few of those will become CEO/CTO of Fortune 500 companies and all built on top of Amazon Web Services." Marcello also publishes the Seattle Startup Index.

Congratulations to the winners, and our thanks to all those who participated.

-- Jeff;

PS - I am sure that the first comment will be "When are you doing this again?" I don't know!

AWS Start-Up Challenge Videos and Voting

Ok race fans, now it is your turn to participate in the next phase of the AWS Start-Up Challenge!

We've interviewed each of the finalists, created a video, and put them up here. You can see them at work and hear them talk about their products in their own words. I think that you will find them to be both entertaining and informative.

We'd like you to watch each video and then vote for your favorite (you have to choose just one).

You can even embed your favorite video anywhere you'd like and encourage others to click through to vote. The embed code is right there on the page.

The finalists will be honored next week at a dinner in Seattle and we look forward to meeting each of them.

-- Jeff;