Amazon Web Services Blog

New and Cool - VPN-Cubed & Glue

Two of my friends, coincidentally named Alexis and Alex, emailed me yesterday with information about their latest and greatest AWS-powered products.

Alexis works for CohesiveFT.

Their new product, VPN-Cubed, creates encrypted, private VPN (Virtual  Private Network) connections between endpoints in a single cloud, between multiple clouds, and between the cloud and a physical data center.

Corporate customers (such as the ones I met at yesterday's Architecture and Integration Summit in Minneapolis) are taking a serious look at EC2. When they do so, they invariably ask about security. Products like VPN-Cubed are of immense value in this situation, providing customers of this type with important new ways to securely move data from place to place in a secure and totally protected fashion.

Read the VPN-Cubed datasheet to learn more, or flip through the 30-slide overview on SlideShare.

Update: The Rational Security blog has a really nice review of the product: CohesiveFT VPN-Cubed: Not Your Daddy's Encrypted Tunnel.

 

Alex is CEO of AdaptiveBlue. He was delighted to tell me that they just completed their Series B funding round (congratulations) and also mentioned that they have some open developer positions in their New York City office.

They have just released Glue, a new way to share favorites and connect with like-minded friends online as they navigate through popular web sites. You can easily what your friends think about books, movies, music, stocks, restaurants, and more, even if information about the subject is scattered across more than one site.

Learn more by reading the blog post, watching the movie, and then get Glue. Glue was built using EC2, S3, and  SimpleDB.

And with that, time to head to the airport to fly home to Seattle!

-- Jeff;

Gas-Free S3-Powered Window Shopping : Amazon's Windowshop.com

Imagine if I can have all pleasures of window shopping without stepping out of my warm and cozy home. Not having to worry about the cold winter or always-increasing-gas-prices or even wasting my precious energy.

Introducing Amazon's Windowshop.com. You can use the power of your fingers (and arrow keys) to move and browse through best-selling Amazon.com products in different categories. Even see a cool preview of a movie or listen to a sample MP3 song by just hitting the space bar on the keyboard. You have to see it to believe it.

The tool shows all best-sellers and new releases in Books, Music, Video, Video Games categories. Also, there is a very interesting chronological aspect that drifts the older content slowly to the right as new fresh content is pushed every Tuesday!

Let me tell you why I am excited about windowshop.com. It's because Amazon's Windowshop is fully powered by Amazon S3. All the high-quality media, audio, images are served hot from Amazon S3 and at lightening speeds in real-time. Now that's cool!

-- Jinesh

Upcoming AWS Events - Fall 2008

Here are some upcoming events that should be of interest to the AWS community:

Eric Hammond (creator of a number of public EC2 Ubuntu and Debian AMIs) will teach an EC2 Beginners Workshop at Barcamp LA on the 25th and 26th of October (that's this weekend). Update: Eric has provided plenty of additional information on the workshop in the comments.

John Nousis will be hosting an AWS meetup in Greece on the 29th of October. John plans to discuss EC2, SimpleDB, S3, DevPay, RightScale, Ylastic, Jollat, and Bucket Explorer.

RightScale will be running a live webinar on the topic of Auto-Scaling Server Arrays on the 30th of October. The webinar is free but registration is required.

The final stops of the AWS Start-Up Tour will take place in London (November 4th), Amsterdam (November 6th) and Seattle (November 20th).

If you are running or are aware of any other events, let me know and I'll update this post (perhaps I will even use a real calendar at some point). Here are some updates:

On November 1st, AJ McKee is planning to talk about APIs, scaling, AWS, and Gnip at Barcamp Cork.

The November 11th meeting of the New York City Cloud Computing Group will focus on Building, deploying, supporting high availability applications on EC2 and S3. AWS developer Kaavo will demo their IMOD (Infrastructure and Middleware on Demand) system on EC2.

Enjoy!

-- Jeff;

Big Day for Amazon EC2: Production, SLA, Windows, and 4 New Capabilities

My colleagues and I have spent the week building up anticipation for this post on Twitter. After you read this post I am sure that you will agree that the wait was worthwhile.

The hallways at Amazon have been buzzing with excitement of late. After working for years to build and to run our line of highly scalable infrastructure web services we are happy to see that developers large and small are putting them to good use.

Here's what's happening today:

• Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone.
• There's now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2.
• Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2.
• Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2.
• We plan to release an interactive AWS management console.
• We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.

Let's take a look at each of these items in turn.

Production - After a two year beta period, Amazon EC2 is now ready for production. During the beta we heard and responded to an incredible amount of customer feedback, adding support for powerful features such as Availability Zones, Elastic Block Storage, Elastic IP Addresses, multiple instance types, support for the OpenSolaris and Windows operating systems, and (as of today) a Service Level Agreement. Regular EC2 accounts are allowed to run up to 20 simultaneous instances. Requests for hundreds and even thousands of additional instances are granted all the time and can be made here.

SLA - The new EC2 Service Level Agreement works at the Region level. Each EC2 Region (there's only one right now but there will be more in the future) is divided into a number of Availability Zones. The SLA specifies that each Region will be available at least 99.95% of the time. Per the SLA, a Region is unavailable if more than one of its Availability Zones does not have external connectivity.

Windows Support - Beta level support for Microsoft Windows is now available on EC2, in the form of 32 and 64 bit AMIs, with pricing starting at $0.125 per hour. Microsoft SQL Server is also available in 64 bit form. All of the powerful EC2 features listed above can be used with the new Windows instances and we'll be adding support for DevPay in the near future.

Once launched, the Windows instances can be accessed using the Windows Remote Desktop or the rdesktop client. I've spent some time using Windows on EC2 and it works really well. I used the EC2 command line tools to launch a 32 bit instance, opened up an additional port in the security group, and then logged in to it using Remote Desktop.

 

We'll be running Windows on EC2 at next week's PDC in Los Angeles, so be sure to stop by and to say hello if you are there. Rumor has it that we'll be giving out a really cool badge to the people who stop by our booth.

RightScale founder Thorsten von Eiken has written up a helpful post which outlines the differences between Windows and Linux with respect to launching, accessing, bundling, and using the Elastic Block Store. He also describes current and planned support for Windows in their products.

We've updated ElasticFox with a number of new features, including direct access to EBS and Elastic IP addresses from the main tab, one-click AMI bundling on Windows, better key and security group management, and the ability to directly launch Remote Desktop sessions. There's also a brand-new (and very helpful) ElasticFox Getting Started Guide.

We are looking forward to seeing how our customers will put Windows to work. We expect to see ASP.Net sites, media transcoding, HPC (High Performance Computing), and more. I've talked to a number of developers who will deploy hybrid web sites using a mix of Linux and Windows servers. This really underscores the open and flexible nature of EC2.

We are also planning to offer some new capabilities in 2009 to make managing cloud-based applications even easier. As usual, we'll start with a private beta and you can express your interest here.

Management Console - The management console will simplify the process of configuring and operating your applications in the AWS cloud. You'll be able to get a global picture of your cloud computing environment using a point-and-click web interface.

Load Balancing - The load balancing service will allow you to balance incoming requests and traffic across multiple EC2 instances.

Automatic Scaling - The auto-scaling service will allow you to grow and shrink your usage of EC2 capacity on demand based on application requirements.

Cloud Monitoring - The cloud monitoring service will provide real time, multi-dimensional monitoring of host resources across any number of EC2 instances, with the ability to aggregate operational metrics across instances, Availability Zones, and time slots.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has done a very nice job of explaining why services of this type are needed to build highly reliable and highly scalable applications. His blog is a must read for those interested in cloud computing. Werner has spent so much time talking about AWS of late that I've asked him to be an honorary member of my team of AWS evangelists!

I think it is important to note that load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring will each be true web services, with complete APIs for provisioning, control, and status checking. We'll be working with a number of management tool vendors and developers to make sure that their products will support these new services on a timely basis.

So, there you go. What do you think?

-- Jeff;

rPath Webinar - The Pragmatist's Guide to Cloud Computing

On Thursday, October 23rd, rPath will be hosting a cloud computing webinar at 11 AM PST.

Billy Marshall, founder and chief strategy officer of rPath will host. Guests will include Frank Gillette of Forrester Research, Jeff Schneider of MomentumSI, and I. We'll talk about how cloud computing is closing the gap between development and operations, and we'll show how organizations can capitalize on the promise of the cloud using a graduated and architecturally sound approach.

The webinar is free but advance registration is required.  See you there!

-- Jeff;

Amazon S3 - Busier Than Ever

Amazon S3 usage has grown very nicely in the last quarter and now stands at 29 billion objects, up from 22 billion just a quarter ago. As one of the S3 engineers told me last week, that's over 4 objects for every person now on Earth!

Our customers are keeping S3 pretty busy too. To give you an example of what this means in practice, the peak S3 usage for October 1st was over 70,000 storage, retrieval, and deletion requests per second.

All of this usage drives increasing economies of scale, or (in plain English) lower costs. I am happy to say that, effective November 1st, 2008, a new tiered pricing model for Amazon S3 storage will go in to effect. The new model features four price tiers, with prices decreasing based on the amount of storage used by each customer. Here is a full breakdown:

Tier	US	EU	Description
0-50 TB	$0.150/GB	$0.180/GB	First 50 TB per month of storage used
50-100 TB	$0.140/GB	$0.170/GB	Next 50 TB per month of storage used
100-500 TB	$0.130/GB	$0.160/GB	Next 400 TB per month of storage used
500+ TB	$0.120/GB	$0.150/GB	Storage used per month over 500 TB

Customers large, small, and in-between have put S3 to all sorts of uses. Here are a few that you might find interesting:

National Geographic's topo.com site stores seamless image maps for the entire United States in S3. You'll need to register in order to see the maps.

Oracle Secure Backup now includes a Cloud Module which supports direct, multi-threaded backup to S3. Read the new white paper to learn more.

-- Jeff;

PS - We'll be updating the AWS Calculator when the new pricing model goes in to effect.

Links from London

I am in London for a couple of conferences and meetings. I arrived this past Sunday and have just about shaken off the jet lag. I have a whole bunch of interesting stuff in my inbox and some time to blog, so here goes.

First, we've extended the deadline for entering the AWS Start-Up Challenge to October 10th. If you haven't entered yet, you still have a couple of days to come up with and  submit your idea for the next great start-up.

 

Fellow evangelist Mike Culver has just produced a new screencast. In How to Create Requests (HITs) in Amazon Mechanical Turk, Mike shows how to create and run a survey using the web-based Requester tools on the Mechanical Turk site and how to approve and view the results, all in a 5 minutes and 13 seconds.

 

We have a lot of really nice EC2 AMIs on our site, but they've been a bit hard to find. I just received word that the URL http://aws.amazon.com/amis is now a permanent shortcut to the EC2 AMI directory. At that location you can see our featured AMIs and you can also view them by provider (Amazon, Community, or third-party vendor -- currently Oracle and Sun).

 

A new release of the Amazon Associates Web Service (AAWS) is now available. This release includes additional control over sorting of reviews, new sort parameters in the DE (Germany) locale, and three new operations and ten new response groups related to vehicles. VehiclePartLookup, VehiclePartSearch, and VehicleSearch enable you to find vehicles, vehicle parts, and vehicles that a part works in.

 

En route to London I was listening to the IT Management Podcast. I heard John M. Willis say that he really likes to read this blog (hi John). After landing I sent John a quick note of thanks, and he asked me to mention the upcoming (October 14th) Awsome meeting in Atlanta. RightScale will be presenting.

John also does the Cloud Cafe podcast. I haven't had the chance to listen but will add it to my iTunes list as soon as I get home.

 

-- Jeff;

Coming Soon: Amazon EC2 With Windows

We're getting ready to enable the use of Microsoft Windows Server on Amazon EC2 later this Fall.

You will be able to use Amazon EC2 to host highly scalable ASP.NET sites, high performance computing (HPC) clusters, media transcoders, SQL Server, and more. You can run Visual Studio (or another development environment) on your desktop and run the finished code in the Amazon cloud.

The 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows Server will be available and will be able to use all existing EC2 features such as Elastic IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and the Elastic Block Store. You'll be able to call any of the other Amazon Web Services from your application. You will, for example, be able to use the Amazon Simple Queue Service to glue cross-platform applications together.

Existing EC2 tools will be able to launch Windows-powered EC2 instances. Once launched, you can use the Windows Remote Desktop or the rdesktop tool to access your instances.

I fully expect to see this new level of flexibility used to create complex, highly scalable, heterogeneous EC2 applications using a mix of Linux, Solaris, and Windows instances, all on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The product is currently in a private beta and is scheduled for public release before the end of 2008. I will, of course, have more to say about this exciting new development as we get closer to the release date. If you'd like to be notified when this new offering is available, just let us know.

We'll be at the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles at the end of October. Be sure to stop by our booth to say hello if you are at the conference.

Update: Windows instance pricing will be strictly pay-as-you-go, like our other services. Customers will only pay for as much or little as they actually use; of course the actual price will be higher than Linux-based instances, due to the cost of Windows licenses. We'll announce specific pricing when we make the service broadly available later this Fall.

-- Jeff;