Amazon Web Services Blog

Zmanda Webinar

At 10 AM on Wednesday, February 13th, Dmitri Joukovski from Zmanda will explain how backup to Amazon S3 complements traditional backup to disk and tape. He will also demonstrate how easy it is to configure Amanda Enterprise for backup and recovery to Amazon S3.

Dmitri will talk about the benefits of using S3 for off-site backup and archiving. He will also list the advantages of using Amanda Enterprise with S3 vs online backup services. The webinar will show how easy it is to configure and backup to S3 using Amanda Enterprise.

The webinar is free but pre-registration is a must.

-- Jeff;

New Release of Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

We've just rolled out a new version of the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS for short).

After taking a detailed look at the ways that the clever folks in our developer community (now 330,000 - strong by the way) are using SQS, we made a number of changes to increase the cost efficiency of the service, removing a few calls and reducing the maximum message size.

The original version of SQS features a pricing model base on the number of messages sent. The new and improved model is based on the actual number of web service requests. Instead of paying 10 cents for every 1000 messages, you will now pay 1 cent for every 10,000 requests.

If you poll your SQS queues to check for new messages, you should re-examine your code to see if you can do things more efficiently under this new pricing system. In particular, if you find that there's nothing to process, you should implement a backoff scheme of some sort. If your first request in a series doesn't find anything to process, wait 1 second and try again. If there's still nothing there, wait 2 seconds, and then 4, up to some upper bound based on the specific needs of your application.

We also found that a number of our developers are using SQS as a fundamental part of their Amazon-powered infrastructure. One common use is to dedicate Amazon EC2 instances to host particular components of a multi-stage image or document processing system using SQS queues to buffer the messages between stages. A system built on this architecture can be scaled to take on additional load by simply adding more EC2 instances at any stage. Systems built like this also exhibit a high degree of fault tolerance. You can learn more about this particular architectural model in Jinesh's post on SQS: The Super Queue Service and you can read about this model in action by reading François Beausoleil's post about Using SQS and S3 to decouple image resizing from uploading.

Using SQS as a piece of application infrastructure is now more economical than ever because (drum roll) there's no longer any charge to move data back and forth between EC2 and SQS! Note that you can use the AWS Simple Calculator to model your system and to estimate your monthly charges.

There's more information on these exciting changes in the forum post.

-- Jeff;

Second Life Developer Chat Schedule for February 2008

Here's the Second Life chat schedule for February. All of the chats will take place at 10 AM PST on the Amazon Developers Islands in Second Life.

If you are new to Second Life and have trouble locating the island, simply log in 15 minutes or so before the chat and send me ("Jeffronius Batra") an Instant Message (IM). I will help you. Once you have Second Life installed you should be able to get to the right place by clicking here.

• Thursday, February 7th
• Thursday, February 14th
• Thursday, February 21st
• Thursday, February 28th

We discuss the various Amazon Web Services, application architectures, issues, use cases, and lots more.

Important Update: Members of the AWS Developer Support team will be in attendance on the 7th (and on the other days if we get enough questions). So bring us your S3, EC2, SQS, and SimpleDB questions and we'll do our best to answer them right away.

Hope to see you there!

-- Jeff;

Wowza Media Server Pro On Amazon EC2

The unpredictable nature of the demand for rich media files, coupled with the amount of bandwidth needed to deal with a video that suddenly "goes viral" combine to create the circumstances for an event that I sometimes refer to as a "success disaster." This happens when you create something cool and hope that it will catch on (bringing with it at least a modicum of fame and fortune), but when it does catch on you are faced with a wall of traffic that you cannot hope to satisfy. It is expensive and impractical to have spare servers standing by in the off chance that you are faced with a sudden demand for one of your media products.

An on-demand, web-scale solution can help you to sidestep this particular problem. The Wowza Media Server Pro can be purchased in two ways. You can buy a traditional, fixed-price license and use it to stream as much media as you'd like for a single server. This is probably the way to go if you have access to a dedicated server and if you have a good handle on the demand for your media files. The server supports the RTMP protocol (and the RTMPT and RTMPS variants) used to stream Flash media files.

Alternatively, you can run the same server on one or more Amazon EC2, paying a very modest monthly fee (currently $5) and then per-hour and bandwidth-based charges a bit above and beyond what's charged for EC2 itself. If you don't have servers of your own, if you are faced with unpredictable demand, then this is a great way to go. You could keep a single server running at all times and then add additional instances when traffic surges. The product is available in a 32-bit version suitable for Small EC2 instances and in a 64-bit version for Large and Extra Large instances.

You can learn more about how to run the product on EC2 by reading the User Guide (That's a PDF). After a quick reading it looks like this would be pretty easy to set up. The AMIs are generic, with customization information supplied via an external startup package. The package enumerates the set of application packages to be installed, specifies the folder structure for the server, initiates downloads of content (Amazon S3 would be a good place to keep it, of course) and provides a mechanism to call startup or tuning scripts. The AMI also includes a password-protected FTP server and an interface to the Java Management Extensions (JMX).

This is all very cool stuff, and another way that Web-Scale Computing is changing the economics of doing business online.

-- Jeff;