A whole lot of interesting AWS items have landed in my inbox in the 20 days since my last
links post.
Here's what I have queued up:
Chris Richardson wrote to tell me that there are still a few seats available in his upcoming
half-day class,
Running Java and Grails applications on Amazon EC2.
The class will take place on February 17th in Oakland, California. Chris, the author of
POJOs in Action, creator of the
Cloud Tools, and proprietor of the
Cloud Foundry
(recently reviewed in
eWeek), will cover Amazon-style cloud computing, deep-dive into AWS, talk about the
use of
Amazon EC2,
provide an overview of the Cloud Tools, and then jump into developing and
deploying on EC2.
Tom Lounibos, CEO of
SOASTA, dropped me a note to tell me that they recently
used the EC2-powered
CloudTest sytem to simulate the effect of 500,000
concurrent users downloading songs from a major media site. In an
entry
on the SOASTA blog, Tom notes that
Companies such as Hallmark.com,
Genentech, and Proctor & Gamble have discovered Cloud Testing as an
affordable and scalable alternative to traditional stress testing. For a
few thousand dollars huge stress tests can be acheived in as little as one hour.
These tests generate a substantial amount of data, ranging from 100 GB up to
1 TB in certain cases. SOASTA's testing tool also provides real-time analytic processing
of this huge amount of data.
Prabhakar from
Ylastic
wrote in to tell me that they have added full support for
EC2's new
EU region.
They provide access to
all EC2 resources (AMIs, access keys, security groups, elastic IPs, EBS volumes, and EBS snapshots),
along with with a set of filtering and searching toools. Support for mobile (iPhone and
Android) versions is almost ready and will be rolled out in the near future. Ylastic
also tracks and organizes all EC2 alerts.
I met
Yuvi Kochar, CTO of
The Washington Post,
at a DC-area CTO event a year or
two ago. We've stayed in touch and I paid a visit to him and his team last year
on one of my trips east.
A few months ago Yuvi let me know that he needed a Wiki running in the EC2
cloud for a new project. After getting a good understanding of his needs
I pointed him at the
Mindtouch Deki product
(previously blogged here).
Yuvi
wrote about his experiences
in selecting and setting up the site,
noting that "Our dev and prod sites were up and running in days! Incredible!"
Last week, in conjunction with the inauguration day
festivities, they launched
Whorunsgov.com. On the site you can get an
insight into the people behind the scenes in Washington DC. You can see how deals
get made and how policy is shaped. Read more on the site's
blog.
While I was putting the finishing touches on this post, I saw a
Tweet from the
folks at Mindtouch. They put together
an excellent
press release
with even more information about the project and the selection criteria.
Jamal from
Kaavo
wrote in to tell me about the recent release of their
IMOD
product. IMOD stands for Infrastructure on Demand. IMOD uses an
application-centric view of lifecycle management, managing anything
from a single server to a complex multi-server system using their
dynamic template technology. They also support goodies such as
AED256 encryption of EBS volumes, monitoring of CPU, I/O, and memory
usage, alerts for application service levels, and automatic backup
of EBS volumes.
Read more on the
IMOD Fact Sheet or
watch some of the following videos (each conveniently hosted on
Amazon S3):
On Wednesday, February 4th, AWS evangelist Jinesh Varia will talk about use of AWS
within the biotech community. Co-sponsored by
Cirrhus9,
the event will take place at Pfizer's lab in La Jolla, California. Attendance
is free but you need to register.
You'd better hurry, there are just 17 seats left.
Bob from Rockstar Apps wrote to tell me about
their new
Amazon WS tools.
The tools plug in to
Eclipse and
Aptana, where they are available as the "Amazon WebService Perspective."
The Amazon WS Tools provide full support for
CloudFront,
SimpleDB,
S3,
SQS, and
EC2. Each tool provides one or more views into
the corresponding Amazon web service. For example, you can enter SimpleDB queries in
the Query Editor, and you can see the results in the SimpleDB View, as you can see
here.
The tools can be downloaded here. Bob provided
me with the following installation instructions:
- Go to the [Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install] Menu Item.
- Create a New Remote Site. Call is "jsLex Update Site" and reference
http://www.rockstarapps.com/update-beta.
- Keep clicking through the screens until it is installed.
Pete from
Juice Analytics
wrote to tell me about their new
Concentrate
application. Concentrate is a search analytics tool for SEO
and paid search professionals. It allows them to make better
decisions, target SEO efforts, understand paid search campaigns,
and better understand customer needs. Concentrate discovers
and visualizes interesting patterns in the search queries used
to locate a site. The word tree shown at right is just one
form of output.
Concentrate is available under a number of different
pricing plans, ranging from
Free
all the way up to Max. You can also start out by looking at the
online demo.
On the technical side, Concentrate runs on EC2. Here's what Pete told me:
The front end is powered by
the DJango framework
and
the jQuery JavaScript library,
all load balanced atop a number of EC2 instances.
They run
MySQL
and store their data on
EBS volumes.
The back end consists of an EC2 cluster running Concentrate's text
mining algorithms. It accepts requests using a REST API and returns
data in
JSON format. The back end uses
Amazon SQS and
S3, and was
patterned after the model found in our
Grep The Web
example. Scaling is handled using a combination of
iClassify,
Puppet, and
Capistrano. The deployment
infrastructure was built by
HJK Solutions of Seatle.
Andrew from
Job Bounty Hunter wrote to tell me
that they'd launched the site and that every last bit of it is running on top of
AWS.
Employers and recruiters can use the site to publish job advertisements, along with
a cash bounty on each job. Bloggers and web publishers can post the ads on their
site using a variety of
widgets.
Job seekers apply for the jobs via the widgets.
If they are placed in the job and stay there for 90 days, the blogger or web
publisher collects the bounty! As you can see from their
bounty chart,
there's currently $7,800 up for grabs just a few days after their launch. This
is a really cool way to monetize web traffic while also providing a very
interesting service for the site's readers.
Because the widgets are embedded in other sites, Andrew has no idea when a
traffic surge might hit. They must
be able to scale to match the traffic of all of the sites that are
displaying their widgets. Of course, this need for elastic capacity made
it a perfect for for AWS!
They decided to serve up all of the widgets as static HTML. They are created
using PHP and then downloaded using Curl into static HTML. The static HTML
is then deployed to
CloudFront (via
S3) and
Nginx. The front end of the site was implemented
using HTML, CSS,
Adobe Flex, JavaScript, and (again)
jQuery.
Job Bounty Hunter currently runs on three EC2 instances. The first runs the
free version of IBM's DB2 database.
The seocnd one runs
Apache,
Postfix,
PHP, and some web service code. The third instance
runs Nginx and serves up static content such as widgets, JavaScript, images,
HTML, and SWF files.
Andrew also sent along a very nice architecture diagram as an
image
and as
PDF.
Long-time AWS user Alex Iskold has written an illuminating
post about his use of
Amazon SimpleDB for his new
Glue product.
In the
post,
he talks about how Glue is used connect people and things,
recognizing books, music, movies, and other everyday topics in hundreds
of web sites and connecting people around the topics. He then goes on
to discuss the reasons why a relational database won't solve his
problems, including scale and automatic partitioning and replication
of his data. From there he describes his use of 30 SimpleDB domains
to hold information about People, and another 30 about Things. He
uses the
djb2
hash algorithm to spread the information out across
the available domains, and also stores data redundantly to
obviate the need for joins.
Lasso2GGO uses a number of different services
including
S3,
EC2, and the
Mechanical Turk. This service makes it easy to
convert "analog" business cards into handy digital data.
You can take a picture of the card with your cell phone web cam, or otehr device and upload
it to Lasso. After some image enhancement on EC2, the image is transcribed by a
Mechanical Turk worker and deposited in Salesforce,
an email, or a spreadsheet. Read all about this in the recent Information Week story,
How The Cloud Enables A New Set Of Personal Applications.
Finally, John-David from New Zealand's Mindscape
wrote in to tell me about their new products:
SimpleDB
Management Tools for Visual Studio and
LightSpeed -
The Mindscape .Net O/R Mapper.
The SimpleDB Management Tools integrate directly into Visual Studio 2008 and above. The
tools support direct addition, editing, and deletion of SimpleDB data and domains and
can also run SimpleDB queries. The tools plug in to the O/R Mapper, with direct dragging
of SimpleDB domains from the management tool into the mapper.
And that's all that I have time for today. I hope that you've enjoyed this glimpse
in to some of the cool stuff that our developer community (now 490,000 members strong)
has been up to. Send me
information about what you are doing with
AWS and I'll do my best to fit you in.
--Jeff;
The existing tiers apply at the 10 TB, 50 TB, and 150 TB transfer levels. We've added
new levels and corresponding price breaks at 250 TB, 500 TB, 750 TB, and 1 PB. You
can visit the CloudFront home page
to see all of the pricing tiers.
Almost! 
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