Amazon Web Services Blog

Webinar: Monetize Your Innovation with Amazon FPS and Get Started Free

Are you thinking about accepting payments on your website? Or perhaps you already accept payments, but you're tired of the fees and an inflexible interface. The Amazon Flexible Payment Service team is presenting two free webinars that will be very useful in either case.

The first session is on Wednesday March 4, 2009, from 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST, and the second is on Tuesday March 10, 2009, from 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST. These webinars will introduce you to Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS).

With Amazon FPS you can accept payments on your website for selling goods or services, raising donations, performing recurring payments, and sending payments. These webinars are an opportunity to learn more about Amazon FPS and how you can use the flexibility it provides to monetize your innovation. I know that quite a few websites have encountered PCI Compliance Audits, which in my opinion are a real challenge to comply with. There are many reasons to use this service (I mentioned a couple at the top of this post); however PCI compliance alone is an excellent motivation.

Earlier this month Amazon FPS entered general availability and also introduced Amazon FPS Quick Starts, a simplified set of APIs that ease integration while maintaining the flexibility of Amazon FPS.

Best of all there is a limited time offer that lets you get started free! Build an application using Amazon FPS and get FREE payment processing for the first 90 days until total transaction volume reaches $500,000.

Sign up before March 15th, 2009 and Get Started FREE!

If you have an online business or are a developer working with an online business this webinar is for you.

Note: Amazon FPS allows U.S. as well as international customers to use major credit cards to make payments on Amazon FPS-powered websites. However, bank account and Amazon Payments account balance transfers are enabled only for US based customers. All transactions are in U.S. dollars.

-- Mike

AWS Links - Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Ok folks, it is Wednesday, and that means it is time for another in my continued series of posts about what's happening in the Amazon Web Services world! With 490,000 developers in our program, there's always plenty to talk about.

I write these posts using source material drawn from emailed hints, clues that I find on Twitter, hallway conversations with colleagues, technical news sources such as Hacker News and Reddit's Programming section, and items that I glean from the hundreds of blogs that I scan each week.

Today I've got information about some new AWS case studies, a help-wanted ad for a system administrator position in New York, law firm automation, news from RightScale, an update on the SimpleDB Explorer, another iPhone interface to EC2, a developer contest from the makers of the Peek, a beta test announcement from CohesiveFT, and a success story from Others Online.

 

New Case Studies

Our marketing department has been working overtime to put together some new case studies. Their newest studies describe how Wowza Media Systems ("The #1 Choice For Media Streaming") and Xignite ("Financial Market Data On-Demand") use AWS.

The Wowza Media Systems case study recounts Wowza's decision to use EC2 to allow startups and small businesses to offer scalable Flash media streaming, live and on-demand video, and other services. They explain that hundreds of customers have signed up for the service via Amazon DevPay and that their revenue has increased by 400% in just 6 months. Their solution can also access media stored in Amazon S3.

Moving right along, the Xignite case study talks about how they used EC2 and S3 to construct a highly scalable platform which serves up financial market data to over 400 corporate clients. Faced with a traffic curve which looked like a Bell Curve, they built a system which incorporates application servers, load balancers, and caches to handle peak loads without the need for standby capacity.

We have a whole bunch of other great AWS case studies if you want to keep on reading.

 

Help Wanted - AWS System Administrator in New York

Tammy from the Filife personal finance community asked me to post a help wanted ad for her and I am happy to do so. Per their job posting they are looking for a versatile system administrator to maintain their EC2-powered virtual server farm. This is a full-time position based in New York.

Although Tammy that their implementation is "a bit too generic to be interesting," I don't believe that to be the case. They use multiple sizes of EC2 instances to run the web front-ends, MySQL, and HA Proxy, with a bunch of EBS volumes for storage. Code deployment is managed via Puppet and Capistrano, allowing them to set up new instances very quickly.

 

LawRD - AWS-Powered Data Tracking for Law Firms

Jorge emailed me from Portugal to make sure that I knew about his company's product, Lawrd. Powered by EC2, this product collects, tracks, and produces reports on all of the data generated by a lawyer or a law firm.

After paying a very modest per-user monthly fee of 14 Euros per month, users can track the facts (what, when, where, and how) for each case, client, and employee. Timesheets, contact lists, invoices, and reports are all readily available. All data is encrypted and of course there's no local software to install.

Jorge also told me that they use Eric Hammond's Unbuntu AMIs and EBS, and that they can update their code with a simple SVN checkout.

Qualified users can get started today with a free trial.

 

RightScale Rocks On

There's a whole lot happening at RightScale ("Cloud Computing. Delivered"). As I write this, the counter on their site indicates that they have launched 324,051 servers!

On March 3rd we'll host an Executive Seminar on Cloud Computing in New York with speakers from Amazon Web Services, RightScale, MySQL, and Starcut. Unfortunately, registration has already been closed due to a very high response. You can still join the waiting list by emailing rsvp-aws@amazon.com.

Earlier this month they announced support for EC2 in Europe, with full support for replication of AMIs and their server templates across the Atlantic. And, just yesterday, they updated their RightScale Ruby Gems.

 

New SimpleDB Explorer

Saurabh informed that there's a new release of SimpleDB Explorer on the loose! The new release supports exporting of a domain's contents to an XML file, sorting, searching, the new SimpleDB Select syntax, and also displays the cost of each query. There's also a new command-line tool. Read more in his blog post.

 

ElasticPod - EC2 Cluster Management on the iPhone

Eugene wrote to tell me that his ElasticPod EC2 interface is now available in the iPhone App Store.

You can launch new EC2 instances, manage your keys, and terminate individual instances or all instances in a reservation group. You check the status of your instances on a color-coded display, and you can even bounce back and forth between multiple AWS accounts. ElasticPod works in vertical and horizontal view, and looks pretty cool (note to boss: Please buy me an iPhone so that I can test out cool apps like this).

 

Peek Developer Contest

Dan from Peek wrote to tell me that they are running a developer contest. They are looking for some cool applications which combine the Peek APIs and the location-based APIs provided by Xtify.

A Peek (since you were just about to ask), is a mobile device dedicated to email. Designed for everyone except hardcore techies (per their site), it is thin, stylish (available in three colors: gray, aqua, and cherry), and very easy to use. You can buy one online or at your local Target. I have to say that it is is really cool to see AWS-powered devices at the Target down the street from my house. Technology has now become far more commonplace and accessible than it was just a few years ago.

Last year, Dan described Peek's use of AWS in a blog post. At the time they were running over 30 EC2 instances and storing about 400 GB worth of data on some EBS volumes.

 

CohesiveFT Looking for VPN-Cubed Beta Testers

Patrick from CohesiveFT dropped me a note to tell me that they are now looking for some beta testers for the EC2 version of their VPN-Cubed ("Customer controlled security for the cloud") product; read about the features and requirements here. Beta testers are promised a dramatic discount on the finished product.

You will be able to use this new product to set up a secure "overlay network" which can span EC2's US and EU regions and even other cloud providers. You will have full control of addressing, topology, protocols, and encryption.

 

Others Online Uses AWS to handle 100,000,000 User Profiles

Old friend and one-time colleague Mike Dierken (we worked together last century during the dot-com boom) wrote to tell me how his company, Others Online, uses AWS to track over 100 million user profiles. This Seattle company helps publishers to learn what their audiences care about. They do this using natural language processing, evolutionary algorithms, data mining, and some AI. This all takes a lot of compute power.

Mike told me that they use a pool of application servers, scaling up and down throughout the day in response to actual load. Data is stored on a set of horizontally partitioned MySQL databases and they spin up more as their user base grows. They also use EC2 for their heavy-duty data processing, starting up a bunch of instances, doing the work, and then shutting them down once the work is done.

You can learn more about Others Online by watching the fun video on their home page.

 

And that will have to do it for today; I've still got lots of other stuff on today's TODO list.

-- Jeff;

New AWS Public Data Sets - Economics, DBpedia, Freebase, and Wikipedia

We have just released four additional AWS public data sets, and have updated another one.

In the Economics category, we have added a set of transportation databases from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Data and statistics are provided for aviation, maritime, highway, transit, rail, pipeline, bike & pedestrian, and other modes of transportation, all in CSV format. I was able to locate employment data for our hometown airline and found out that they employed 9,322 full-time and 1,122 part-time employees as of the end of 2007.

In the Encyclopedic category, we have added access to the DBpedia Knowledge Base, the Freebase Data Dump, and the Wikipedia Extraction, or WEX.

The DBpedia Knowledge Base currently describes more than 2.6 million things including 213,000 people, 328,000 places, 57,000 music albums, 36,000 films, and 20,000 companies. There are 274 million RDF triples in the 67 GB data set.

The 66 GB Freebase Data Dump is an open database of the world's information, covering millions of topics in hundreds of categories.

The Wikipedia Extraction (WEX) is a processed, machine-readable dump of the English-language section of the Wikipedia. At nearly 67 GB, this is a handly and formidable data set. The data is provided is the TSV format as exported by PostgreSQL.

Finally, we have updated the NCBI's Genbank data. Weighing in at a hefty quarter of a petabyte terabyte, this public data set contains information on over 85 billion bases and 82 million sequence records.

Instantiating these data sets is basically trivial. You create a new EBS volume of the appropriate size, basing it on the snapshot id of the data. Next, you attach the volume to a running EC2 instance in the same availability zone. Finally, you create a mount point and mount the EBS volume on the instance. The last step can take a minute or two for a large volume; the other steps are essentially instantaneous. Instead of spending days or weeks downloading these data sets you can be up and running from a standing start in minutes. Once again, cloud computing reduces the friction between "I have a good idea" and "here's the realization of my idea." You don't need loads of bandwidth, processing power, or local disk space in order to do interesting and significant work with these world-scale data sets.

-- Jeff;

Virtual Stress-free Testing in the Cloud

I am giving a presentation at upcoming FutureTest conference on "Testing in the Cloud". Using Amazon EC2 for Software Testing  is one of "Lowest-hanging fruit" use cases. In this blog post, I will review some of the highlights of my presentation - some of the cool things the cloud brings to the world of application testing.

Instant Virtual Test Lab
Our customers love the fact that they can spawn up Test boxes when they need them, within minutes and terminate them when they are done with testing. The time it takes to procure new hardware, configuration, upfront investment, under-utilization of testing resources were major obstacles to good quality application testing and hence was often either ignored or was incomplete. The fact that they can now get 10, 15 or even 1000s of server instances encourages better and more complete testing and thereby creating more confidence. Instant test labs for a 3-month Test phase when they spawn few dozens instances to do their traditional usability and functional tests. Outsourcing/QA companies love it because they can now charge their customers for the infrastructure they consumed that month (usage-based costing). The day does not seem far when Cloud becomes the ideal testing infrastructure of the future.

Testing as a Service
Companies are like SOASTA, LoadStorm, Browsermob are building their businesses to provide Testing-as-a-Service. SOASTA spawned 650 EC2 Servers to simulate load from two different availability zones to stress test a music-sharing website QTRAX.  After the 3-month iterative process of test-analyze-fix-test cycle, QTRAX can now serve 10M hits/hour and handle 500K concurrent users. This was a significant improvement from their first test which failed at 500 concurrent users. This "Let's run it again" philosophy encourages iterative process and helps you focus on your fixes while abstracting out all the complexity of generating load and analyzing results (because they provide you with real-time graphs on a dashboard.  Likewise, LoadStorm users can select a target server, build out test plan and run a load test right from their website. Browsermob, built by the core-developer of Selenium project, has created a client parallelization testing tool that spawned 2000 real browsers on 334 High-CPU XL instances for a media company, 1-cast, to test complex streaming and AJAX features of the website. These vendors offer Testing as a Service and reduce the complexity of traditional enterprise tools (like LoadRunner) and have pay-as-you-go models (charging either by bandwidth consumed or testing hours usage) thereby reducing huge upfront licensing cost. Not to mention saving time in learning and configuring these systems and maintaining and operating physical test labs. This "Push it to the Cloud" philosophy helps us to focus on building cool features in our applications and outsource QA while not losing control (unlike traditional outsourcing/offshoring models)

Throw-away boxes
It was funny when I was talking to some developers about testing. One of the developer jumped and said "If you mess up the configuration, simply dump the instance and start a new one. Time is precious, dude!"  I knew developers from server-less start-up companies in our ecosystem, who start their dev boxes every morning and run it for 12 hours (the average developer uptime) per day and shut down every night before they go home. But I never thought that one can actually use Amazon EC2 to create thousands of Test environments in the Cloud - all fresh and new - and dump them, if they mess up and/or recreate it in the next test/sprint cycle. When you are testing your mobile application on different device platforms or testing your database-agnostic and app server-agnostic middleware app on different deployment configurations, the Cloud becomes an ideal platform to create-dump-recreate environments as you need.

Virtualization (AMIs) for Repros
Creating Test Environments with one-click has lots of advantages. The on-going battle between testers, developers and operators of “I cannot reproduce the bug” could be resolved by few clicks and recreating the environments and sharing Amazon Machine Images. It is a one click BundleInstance request (for Windows) using our Management Console and 3 command line calls to bundle/upload/register an AMI (Linux). Of course, its not advisable to create AMIs for every bug (that’s insane) but at least severe production bugs could be reproduced very quickly.

Automation through Web Services
One of the best technology benefits of Cloud Computing is Automation via Web Service Interfaces. It is now easy to setup a system that builds your code at 2AM, runs it on 2 Large Instances for 2 Hours, run all your regression and unit tests to make sure that all the code is compiling fine. (Total Cost ~$1/day). One can also setup to replicate their environment and test the application by running clients from different Geographical Regions (US/EU) and Availability Zones.

Mechanical Turk for Innovative Testing
Using the on-demand workforce to help you in testing your app:

1. Workers create actual test scenarios (Selenium)
2. Workers enable Usability testing
3. Worker help analyze results from Cross-browser testing (present a screenshot and ask a turker to compare the pages)
4. Worker analyzes your test results/log files
5. Worker tests for broken links on your website
6. Workers participate in surveys that rate look-and-feel, navigation, search features of your website

You will find variety of customer stories and actual HITs on Mturk.com. Last year's Start-Up Challenge Contest nominee UserTesting.com uses Amazon Mechanical Turk to create real videos to capture user behavior.

Parallelization (Client and Server)
Browsermob can start up 1000s of real Firefox client browsers (no http simulated traffic) and test your applications the way it should be tested. All of this happens in parallel. Imagine if you could do this on server-side as well. In other words, run all your tests (Unit Tests, Integration Tests, Regression Tests, browsers etc) in parallel. Cost of 1 server that runs for 1000 hours is same as 1000 servers for 1 hour. But in latter case, Quality will be verified in minutes instead of hours and days. Cloud Computing inspires us to think parallel.

To reduce the uncertainty in today's Era of Tera (we never know when your app will be successful), we have to perform all the stress and load tests necessary prior to launch so that we can set the right expectations (SLAs). Customers all around the globe will access your web application. If the website is slow and does not respond, it amounts to bad customer service.

Take advantage of all the technologies that make the cloud (Virtualization for reuse/repros, Web services for automation, crowdsourcing for creating test scenarios) to stress/load/performance test your web applications thereby improving quality and speed (response time) of your application while keeping your costs down.

James Whittaker wrote series of posts on "Future of testing" which I highly recommend everybody to read. He predicts that the next generation of Testing is TestSourcing (after Crowdsourcing, Outsourcing and Insourcing) in which the focus will be on Tests (and not Testers, Testing and Tools). Embellishing on it, I think:

TestSourcing = CrowdSourcing + CloudComputing

Testing in the Cloud - Use the power of the people (on-demand workforce to create standardized re-usable test scenarios) of your apps and the power of cloud computing tools like Amazon EC2 (on-demand hosted Virtualization) and Amazon S3 (for storing your logs/regression results).

How do you see Testing in the Cloud evolve?

If you would like to learn more about these thoughts, Catch me at FutureTest Conference in New York!

-- Jinesh

Update: BrowserMob Blog has more details

Executive Briefing on Cloud Computing

Update: We’ve reached capacity, but we’ll be recording the event and sharing it on our website in the near future.

If you are in New York City, I’d like to call your attention to an executive briefing on Cloud Computing that will be held at NASDAQ Marketsite in Times Square on Tuesday, March 3rd. This half-day event is designed to provide insight into the state of cloud computing technology today, guide you on assessing which projects are ideally suited for cloud computing, and illustrate best practices for managing cloud deployments.

There will be three distinguished speakers in attendance:

• Werner Vogels, who of course is Amazon’s CTO.
• Marten Mickos, who was MySQL CEO and is now a SVP at Sun because Sun acquired MySQL
• Michael Crandell, Rightscale CEO. Most people know Rightscale because of the Cloud management work that they’ve done in the Amazon Web Services environment.

Sign up at aws.amazon.com/exec_seminar/home.

Mike

Amazon SimpleDB - New Count Function, Long Running Queries, Etc.

We've introduced two improvements to SimpleDB's Select API. You can now count the number of items which match a condition, and you can handle queries which take more than 5 seconds to run.

The new count function is used like this:

select count(*) from MyFriends where EyeColor = 'Blue'

Queries which take more than 5 seconds to execute used to time out and returned no useful data. Now, queries will return all of the results accumulated prior to the 5 second time limit, along with a NextToken which will allow a subsequent query to pick up where the first one left off.

You can learn more about both of these features in the SimpleDB Release Notes.

By the way, the basic SimpleDB space allocation is 1 Terabyte (100 domains of 10 Gigabytes each). If you need more domains, fill in this form, send it our way, and and we'll get you going within a day or two.

Other interesting SimpleDB resources include:

• Mike Culver's Introduction to SimpleDB video
• Prabhakar Chaganti's new IBM developerWorks article on Dataset processing in the cloud with SimpleDB
• Donald Flood's SimpleDB Firefox plugin 
• Mindscape's SimpleDB Management Tools for Visual Studio 2008
• The new Ylastic Mobile SimpleDB Query Browser for the iPhone and the Android.
• The SDB Explorer.

-- Jeff;

AWS Links - Wednesday, February 11, 2009

As always, my inbox is simply overflowing with new and innovative AWS-powered applications. Here's just some of what I've received in the last week or two: cool applications from Direct Thought, Zemanta, Jooners, Ylastic, enStratus; Solaris on EC2 from Sun; a job opening at Family Link; a Java library for SimpleDB; system software from AsterData and DataSynapse; an EC2 AMI for processing large amounts of data, and a remarkable new way to use the Mechanical Turk.

David from Direct Thought wrote to tell me that they're working on an iPhone application to control EC2 resources -- images, instances, volumes, security groups, IP addresses, and keypairs. The application supports multiple EC2 accounts and includes an AMI search feature to make it easier to find what you want in our AMI catalog.

He also told me that the application was written using an Objective-C port of his highly respected Typica library. This Apache-licensed port is called cTypica and is available from Google Code.

 

Andraz from Zemanta dropped me a line to let me know that they released a major upgrade and expansion of their content creation and discovery tool.

The original release of the Zemanta provided a helping hand (almost a research assistant) for bloggers, suggeting relevant links and content in real-time as the post is written. This functionality has been enhanced to allow it to recommend additional types of content, including audio, video, and maps. Zemanta takes care to recommend content that has a Creative Commons license or that has been approved for reuse by the original content provider.

The new release now extends this same helping hand to web-based email in the form of a Firefox extension which supports Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. It also adds support and recommendation for specialized content categories including books, music, technology, blogging, green, health, travel, gaming, shopping, and wine.

You can learn more by watching a pair of short and sweet screencasts. The first one shows how Zemanta works with Yahoo! Mail, simplifying the task of linking to pages on popular social networking sites while composing an email. The second one shows how Zemanta can enhance Gmail, suggesting some relevant pictures, links, and reference articles.

 

If you've ever had to plan and coordinate an event across families, teams, clubs, or other semi-formal groups, you'll want to take a look at Jooners, especially if you need to apportion and collect money for fees, dues, or other costs from the participants.

Jooners uses a clean and straightforward wizard-based planner model to plan one-time or recurring events, coupled with the Amazon Flexible Payments Service to handle all of the payment details. There's a helpful introductory video on the home page and a gallery of popular planners.

 

Rajesh from Sun wrote to tell me that the OpenSolaris AMIs for EC2 are now available for use with the US and European EC2 regions. His blog entry includes all of the important details.

This is the 2008.11 release of OpenSolaris which includes a number of new features such as new releases of the Gnome desktop, OpenOffice, and Firefox, automatic file snapshots to ZFS, the very cool-looking Time Slider, better printing, the Songbird music player, an improved package manager, and lots more.

Read the Getting Started Guide to, uh, get started. You may also want to consult the OpenSolaris AMI catalog to learn more about the available public and private (registration required) AMIs.

 

My friends down at Utah-based FamilyLink.com want to hire a combination Systems Administrator and Architect.

The job posting notes that "You'll be on the front line, making sure that our Amazon AWS-based FamilyLink.com sites always work." In a recent blog post, founder Paul Allen notes that their We're Related on Facebook application is one of the 5 most popular, with 12.4 million daily users. Paul says that they've had to restrain growth in order to make sure that they have their system issues under control.

You'll need experience designing, building, and running large-scale systems with AWS, fluency in a couple of scripting languages, and experience with a relational database and a key/value store like Memcached or SimpleDB.

 

Per a note in the Ylastic blog, the Ylastic dashboard for the Apple iPhone and the Google Android is now in production and available for just $10 per month. You can control EC2 instances in the US and in Europe, manage CloudFront distributions, SQS queues, S3 buckes and objects, and watch the AWS Status Health Dashboard.

Check out the pricing and the full feature list to learn more.

 

Minnesota-based enStratus has launched a web-based console to control the deployment of EC2-based web sites and enterprise applications. The console manages security and availability profiles based on organizational requirements, and can bring up additional load balancers, application servers, and database servers as needed. It also handles multiple levels of cloud and cloud-independent backups.

Company founder George Reese writes the Cloud Blog and is wrapping up work on an O'Reilly book called Cloud Application Architectures, currently available in a Rough Cuts edition.

 

SimpleJPA is an open source implementation of the Java Persistence API (JPA) for SimpleDB.

It supports ManyToOne references and OneToMany collections, both with lazy loading. It supports large objects using S3 and caches results. It also makes concurrent requests to SimpleDB to speed things up, and even supports a subset of the JPA Query language.

SimpleJPA's caching and S3 support comes courtesy of BigCache, a simple Java API which implements an infinite shared cache on top of S3. BigCache includes come cool asynchronous methods.

 

Aster Data Systems just released the Aster nCluster Cloud Edition. This release brings the Aster nCluster analytic database to the EC2 cloud, greatly simplifying the process of creating a data warehouse or BI (business intelligence) project and reducing time to market. The product includes a unique in-database MapReduce processing framework; data analysis and transformation is supported inside of the database itself. There's more info in the data sheet.

Aster Data will be hosting a webinar, next week. Titled "Data Warehousing in the Cloud", the webinar will describe how AWS customer ShareThis was able to create a multi-terabyte data warehouse without making a heavy investment in people, time, or hardware.

 

A note on the InfoChimps blog, and a hallway conversation/reminder with my colleague Deepak Singh, led me to machetEC2. Described as an "AMI configuration for exploring Big Data," machetEC2 is an EC2 AMI pre-configured with a very long list of data processing, analysis, and visualization applications atop a solid base of Python, Ruby, and Erlang tools and libraries.

You can launch this AMI and be chewing through a massive chunk of data pulled from the AWS Public Data Sets in no time flat. The next version of machetEC2 will include commands to simplify the process of creating and mounting EBS volumes containing this data.

This is your basic nuclear-powered chainsaw for heavy duty data processing!

 

DataSynapse has extended their DASM (Dynamic Application Service Management) product, DataSynapse Federator with support for EC2). DataSynapse customers will be able to seamlessly bridge traditional data centers and the EC2 cloud. They will be able to create development and testing grids at a very low cost. Finally, they'll be able to use EC2 for disaster recovery, paying for capacity only as needed

Existing DataSynapse customers can register for the space-limited beta program between now and March 4th.

 

Seattle-based SmartSheet is a work management and collaboration tool. Using their straightforward spreadsheet-based model, you can easily enumerate and capture the tasks needed to complete a project and then assign them to partners and co-workers. Already users of EC2, S3, and CloudFront, they have now added Mechanical Turk support to the product.

In addition to assigning tasks to partners and to co-workers, you can now assign them to qualified Mechanical Turk workers on an individual or volume basis. You can now create and successfully complete projects using a workforce of over 200,000 people from over 100 countries! The new brochure suggests that this can be used for surveying, transcription, web research, image tagging, copywriting, website testing, and keyword research. The crew at SmartSheet have called this new model smartsourcing, which sounds good to me.

SmartSheet handles all of the setup, submittal, and retrieval of Mechanica Turk HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks); no coding is required. You can request multiple answers for each item, and you can monitor the results as they arrive using a unified management dashboard. Images can be attached to requests or even requested as responses. You also have the power to accept or reject answers and can even pay bonuses to the best workers. Read more about all of this in the advanced brochure.

Before you go, head over to this page and click the link labeled "Watch Overview Video" to see Smartsourcing in action. This amazing new feature is available to all paid users of SmartSheet.

 

And that's all for today. If you would like your AWS-powered application to be featured here, send me some email and I'll do my best.

-- Jeff;

IBM Software Available on EC2 With Pay-As-You-Go Licensing Model

We've teamed up with IBM to provide software developers with pay-as-you-go access to development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers, IBM Lotus^® content management, and IBM WebSphere^® portal and middleware products, all running on Novell's SUSE Linux on Amazon EC2.

There's a lot to say, so I'll summarize the key points up front before diving in. First, development AMIs are now available at the new IBM Cloud Space on developerWorks. Second, you can bring your existing licenses into the cloud. Third, hourly pricing for the production versions of each product will be published sometime soon.

 

Existing IBM customers can use the licenses they've already bought while still taking advantage of the elastic nature of AWS to handle spikes and peaks. These licenses retain their value and can be used to handle steady state processing needs, with more licenses available (on an hourly basis) in the cloud for peak times. This clean and innovative new model should clear up some of the uncertainty which can cause potential users to think twice before jumping in to cloud computing. A new IBM PVU (Processor Value Unit) table will map between PVUs and the full set of available EC2 instance types. See our new IBM partner page for details.

 

The following products will be available in AMI (Amazon Machine Image) form:

• IBM DB2^® - A database server designed to handle demanding workloads, featuring scaling to handle high volume transaction processing, automatic compression, optimized XML storage, and lots more. Get started here.
• IBM Informix^® Dynamic Server - IBM's flagship database for industrial-strength, embedded computing. Featuring blazing online transaction processing (OLTP) performance, legendary reliability, and nearly hands-free administration. Get started here.
• IBM Lotus^® Web Content Management Standard Edition - End-to-end web content management for internet, intranet, extranet, and portal sites. Get started here.
• IBM WebSphere^® sMash - A development and runtime environment for agile development of Web 2.0-style applications using SOA principles. Get started here.
• IBM WebSphere Portal Server - A runtime server and tools (among other features) that can be used to create a single customized interface for a collection of enterprise applications, combining components, applications, processes, and content from a variety of sources. Get started here.

If you are an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) developing a service that will be commercially available, you are eligible to access these AMIs at no charge (other than the usual EC2 charges, plus nominal setup and monthly fees) for development purposes, via IBM developerWorks. Everything that you'll need to get started can be found in the new Cloud Computing Resource Center. You may also want to read the white paper, IBM's Perspective on Cloud Computing.

As someone who once programmed IBM mainframes using 80 column punched cards, this is a pretty exciting announcement. Developers now have easy access to IBM's line of robust, industrial strength software products and can build highly scalable applications which take full advantage of the new and flexible licensing model. Questions about commercial software licenses (and their applicability to the cloud) come up at almost every one of my speaking engagements! I'm happy to be able to point to IBM as an example of a software vendor with a licensing model which is cloud-aware and cloud-friendly.

I also think that this announcement really highlights EC2's inherent flexibility. Customers can bring their existing code and software licenses into the cloud and can deploy it without having to pay any up-front licensing costs.

-- Jeff;

Amazon DevPay Expands - Linux in Europe, Windows in the US

The official description of Amazon DevPay describes it as "a simple-to-use online billing and account management service that makes it easy for businesses to sell applications that are built in, or run on top of, Amazon Web Services." In practice developers are able to monetize Amazon EC2 AMIs and Amazon S3 applications by selling them at a price above what Amazon charges for the underlying service.

Today we're announcing three new features:

1. In the United States, developers are now able to sell their software as Paid AMIs for the Amazon EC2 running Windows service, in addition to Linux (which as I mentioned above, we already support).
2. Developers based in the US are now able to sell their software on Amazon EC2 running Linux/UNIX in the AWS EU region. (Note that developers must have a US bank account in order to withdraw money.)
3. Additional granularity is now exposed that enables developers to configure which platform/regions/instances they want to allow their end users to run. For example, developers can specify that their software is allowed to run only in the US or EU or on certain EC2 instance types - Windows XL. Etc. Because Amazon Web Services charges slightly different prices on each side of the Atlantic, I expect that developers will want to restrict where the virtual machines run.

There are already well-known examples of software that runs under Amazon EC2 using DevPay. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 can be rented by the hour for as little as $0.21/hour, plus $19/month per account for full support from Red Hat's support team. That's an attractive alternative to purchasing a full license.

How DevPay Works

"AMI" stands for "Amazon Machine Image", which is the file that represents a virtual machine (computer), and includes the operating system (Linux, UNIX, or Windows). The AMI often also includes additional software such as Ruby on Rails packages, video encoding software, a pre-configured test environment, etc.

A "Paid AMI" is an AMI (file) with a combination of the operating system with your software on top of it, as described above, that also has been registered with Amazon Web Services for resale at a price set by you. You set the price, and you collect the difference between what Amazon Web Services charges for EC2 and the price the customer pays. A small commission is also deducted.

Here's the process:

1. A developer creates custom AMIs that include their software. The developer also sets an hourly price for their software (generally above what Amazon Web Services charges!) We call these custom AMIs that are resold "paid AMIs", meaning that a developer makes a profit when their software is used.
2. The developer registers their AMI with DevPay, and also creates a URL on their own website where customers will be able to start the purchase process to use the new AMI. We'll issue a product code to the developer.
3. The product code is associated with the AMI. There's an API command that does this.
4. The AMI must be "shared" (public). Once again there is an API command that accomplishes the task.
5. The developer advertises the AMI to the public; just like any other software product (the developer can also list AMIs in our AMI catalog).
6. Customers sign up to use the AMI, and...
7. ...run the AMI. They will be billed by Amazon Web Services at the price determined by the developer, and the proceeds will be deposited by AWS into the developer's Amazon account. From there the developer can transfer the money into a bank account.

Full implementation details are explained in the online documentation. Pay particular attention to the section titled "Your Product's Configuration and Price". You can also learn more by reading the Release Notes.

Mike

Amazon FPS advances to General Availability, tops it with a limited time FREE offer

We have exciting news coming out right now!

Amazon Flexible Payment Service is now in General Availability - and is easier to use with Amazon FPS Quick Starts. Now you can enable your applications with common payment transactions such as one time payments, recurring payments and pre-payments in hours rather than days.

Amazon FPS is the first payments service designed from the ground up for developers. With Amazon FPS, you can accept payments on your website for selling goods or services, raising donations, executing recurring payments, and sending payments.

Customers can pay you using the same login credentials, shipping address and payment information they already have on file with Amazon.
Isn't that cool?

As we always do at Amazon, we listened to you, and we incorporated your feedback into Amazon FPS Quick Starts, a simplified set of APIs which allows you to implement a solution based on Amazon FPS, with enhanced documentation, SDKs and sample code.

Amazon FPS Quick Starts are categorized by use cases into five interoperable packages:
- Basic: enables one-time payments for e-commerce, digital goods, donations and any other online service.
- Advanced: provides periodic or delayed payment features required by subscription and usage-based services such as digital music and online storage
- Marketplace: designed for building marketplace applications
- Aggregated: reduces processing costs by consolidating multiple transactions, including micro-payments, into a single, larger transaction
- Account Management: simplifies integrating account activity, balance and transaction information

Starting today, developers who sign up for Amazon FPS by March 15th and launch their application by June 1st, 2009, can take advantage of free payment processing for the first 90 days until total transaction volume reaches $ 500,000.


Some creative services enabled by Amazon FPS

Meetup.com
Meetup is a very popular service, it consists of a worldwide network of local, offline groups.
Meetup is using Amazon FPS to help Meetup Groups develop their own economies in the form of membership dues, event tickets and sponsorship payments.

1000 Markets.com
A vast network of boutique marketplaces which enables a robust checkout experience across its members with Amazon FPS.

JungleDisk.com
Uses Amazon FPS to support a subscription-based personal backup system built on top of Amazon S3.  

So, it's time to visit this page to learn more and sign up.

At this time, Amazon FPS and Amazon FPS Quick Starts are only available to AWS customers based in the United States.

Thanks,

Simone

[Simone Brunozzi, AWS Technology Evangelist in Europe, simoneb at amazon dot com, Linkedin, FB]