Amazon Web Services Blog

The AWS Report - Dave Peck, Co-Founder of Cloak

I recently interviewed Dave Peck, Co-Founder of Seattle-based Cloak. Designed for Macs, iPads, and iPhones, Cloak keeps you safe when you use public Wi-Fi networks in coffee shops, airports, hotels and conferences. It does this by creating an encrypted VPN connection between your device and and an Amazon EC2 instance run and managed by Cloak. The instance is dynamically chosen (using a technique that Dave described as "ping racing") to minimize latency.

Here's the interview:

Dave also talks about the false sense of security afforded by certain sites that make use of HTTPS only intermittently, and about how his product can be set up in one minute.

Cloak runs in all of the public AWS regions and they will automatically support new regions as they come online.

We're currently booking AWS Report guests for late summer and early fall. Write us at awsreport at amazon.com if you are interested.

-- Jeff;

 

EC2 Reserved Instances for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

You can now purchase EC2 Reserved Instances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Reserved Instances lower costs by giving you the option to make a low, one-time payment to reserve compute capacity and receive a significant discount on the hourly charge for that instance. Reserved Instances are complementary to existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux On-Demand Instances and give you even more flexibility to reduce computing costs and gain access to a broad range of applications running upon a proven, dependable, and fully supported Linux distribution on the AWS Cloud.

If you want to use Reserved Instances with RHEL, you no longer need to perform additional steps to rebuild On-Demand RHEL AMIs before you can use them on Reserved Instances. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Reserved Instances are available in major versions both in 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, in all Regions except AWS GovCloud.

For technical information, check out the Getting Started Guide: Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2.

For pricing, consult the Amazon EC2 Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux page.

To make it even easier for you to get started, you can get a $50 AWS credit that you can use to launch EC2 instances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

 

-- Jeff;

AWS Week in Review - July 23, 2012

Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:

Tuesday, July 24	I blogged about some improvements to the EC2 tab of the AWS Management Console. IDC published a commissioned white paper to show that the business value of AWS accelerates over time.
Thursday, July 26	We published four new CloudFormation templates for Windows -- SharePoint, Active Directory, IAM Roles, and Elastic Beanstalk.
Friday, July 27	We published an AWS Marketplace Update for the first 90 days.

Stay tuned for another exciting week!

-- Jeff;

New Video - David Geller, CEO of Eyejot

I recently interviewed David Geller, President and CEO of Seattle-based Eyejot, for The AWS Report. I really enjoyed speaking with him and the finished video turned out great:

David talked about his product and explained how he used AWS to allow him to scale to meet demand.

We have a lot more shows in the works for August, September, and beyond. If you are interested in appearing on the show and you can make your way to Seattle, please get in touch at awsreport at amazon.com . Here's a behind the scenes shot from our latest taping:

-- Jeff;

 

AWS Marketplace Update - The First 90 Days

We released the AWS Marketplace in late April of this year. Since that time, growth has been very strong: the number of sellers has doubled and over 75 products have been added to the catalog.

Here are some other fun facts about the Marketplace and ways that our customers are putting it to use:

• The first product sold was Wowza Media Server, launched in Brazil.
• Customers have launched software in all AWS regions, including Ireland, Singapore, Japan, Brazil, and US data centers in Virginia, Oregon, and California.
• The most popular region in terms of hours customers have spent running AWS Marketplace software is the US East (Northern Virginia) data center.
• The most popular overall category is Content Management.
• Other popular categories are Application Development, Databases and Caching (including NoSQL),  Business Intelligence and Network Infrastructure.

If you are looking for pre-configured software that you can use to build products or to run your business, check out the AWS Marketplace. If you have software that you would like to list, start here. Also, you can keep track of our updates on Twitter.

 -- Jeff;

 

New IDC White Paper - Business Value of Amazon Web Services Accelerates Over Time

Analysts Randy Perry and Stephen Hendrick of IDC have just published a commissioned white paper titled The Business Value of Amazon Web Services Accelerates Over Time. You can download the paper now by clicking on the image at right.

Earlier this year, IDC interviewed 11 organizations that use AWS in an effort to understand the long-term economic implications of moving their workloads to the cloud. As part of the study they also looked for changes in developer productivity, business agility, and the ability to deliver new applications that could be attributed to AWS. The AWS customers that they talked to included Samsung, BankInter, Fox, Netflix, Tomlinson Real Estate Group, United States Tennis Association, and Cycle Computing.

The paper contains a complete recitation of their findings. To summarize:

• The five-year TCO of developing, deploying, and managing critical applications on AWS represents a 70% savings compared to deploying the same resources on-premises or in hosted environments.
• The average five-year ROI from using AWS is 626%. Interestingly enough, the return grows (when measured in dollars of benefit for each dollar invested) over time. After 36 months, the organizations interviewed were realizing $3.50 in benefits for each $1 invested in AWS. After 60 months, the benefit grew to $8.40 for every $1 invested.
• Over a five year period, the companies saw cumulative savings that averaged over $2.5 million per application. This included savings in development and deployment costs (reduced by 80%), application management costs (reduced by 52%), and infrastructure support costs (reduced by 56%). Again on average, these organizations were able to replace $1.6 million in infrastructure with $302,000 in AWS costs.

Our customers ran (and measured) both steady-state and variable-state workloads. They ranked these workloads as very critical (4.5 out of 5). In addition to costs savings, they were able to increase their business agility, and brought their applications to market far more quickly.

Enjoy the paper, and leave a comment if you like it!

-- Jeff;

AWS Management Console Improvements (EC2 Tab)

We recently made some improvements to the EC2 tab of the AWS Management Console. It is now easier to access the AWS Marketplace and to configure attached storage (EBS volumes and ephemeral storage) for EC2 instances.

Marketplace Access
This one is really simple, but definitely worth covering. You can now access the AWS Marketplace from the Launch Instances Wizard:

After you enter your search terms and click the Go button, the Marketplace results page will open in a new tab. Here's what happens when I search for wordpress:

Storage Configuration
You can now control the storage configuration of each of your EC2 instances at launch time. This new feature is available in the Console's Classic Wizard:

There's a whole lot of power hiding behind that seemingly innocuous Edit button! You can edit the size of the root EBS volume for the instance:

You can create EBS volumes (empty and of any desired size, or from a snapshot) and you can attach them to the device of your choice:

You can also attach the instance storage volumes to the device of your choice:

These new features are available now and you can use them today!

- Jeff;

AWS Week in Review - July 16, 2012

Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:

Tuesday,  July 17	We reminded you to get ready to register for AWS re:Invent. The Amazon Simple Email Service now supports Simple DKIM signing. Minutes later, developer Andy Chilton updated his Awssum node.js library to support this important new feature. We released a new episode of The AWS Report: Erica Brescia of BitNami.
Wednesday, July 18	We now have High I/O EC2 Instances with 2 TB of SSD-backed storage. Watch EC2 Principal Product Manager Deepak Singh talk about this new instance type. We released a new blog post on scaling with Amazon SQS. You can now monitor EC2 Instance Status Metrics.
Thursday, July 19	There are some new CloudWatch Monitoring Scripts for Microsoft Windows.
Friday, July 20	This week AWS Marketplace added a bunch of new products. Some highlights include Appcelerator Cloud Services (services for app developers), Qloudstat SaaS analytics, and MetaFlows Security System a tool to help detect and prevent cyberattacks. We also added Riverbed’s Stingray Traffic Manager products, in varying capacities and configurations.

Stay tuned for another exciting week!

-- Jeff;

Amazon CloudWatch Monitoring Scripts for Microsoft Windows

A number of AWS services collect and then report various metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. The metrics are stored for two weeks and can be viewed in the AWS Management Console. They can also be used to drive alarms and notifications.

Applications can use CloudWatch's custom metrics facility to store any desired metrics. These metrics are also stored for two weeks and can be used as described above.

Each Amazon EC2 instance reports a number of metrics to CloudWatch. These metrics are collected and reported by the hypervisor, and as such reflect only the data that the hypervisor can see -- CPU load, network traffic, and so forth. In order to report on items that are measured by the guest operating system (Linux or Windows) you need to run a monitoring script on the actual system.

Today we are introducing a set of monitoring scripts for EC2 instances running any supported version of Microsoft Windows Server^®. The scripts are implemented in Windows PowerShell and are provided in sample form so that you can examine and customize them as needed.

 

Four scripts are available (download or read more about the CloudWatch Monitoring Scripts for Windows):

• mon-put-metrics-mem.ps1 collects metrics related to system memory usage and sends them to CloudWatch.
• mon-put-metrics-disk.ps1 collects metrics related to disk usage and sends them to CloudWatch.
• mon-put-metrics-perfmon.ps1 collects metrics from PerfMon counters and sends them to CloudWatch.
• mon-get-instance-stats.ps1 queries CloudWatch and displays the most recent utilization statistics for the instance it was run on.

You will need to install and configure the AWS SDK for .NET in order to make use of the scripts.

 -- Jeff;

PS - We also have similar monitoring scripts for Linux.

 

New High I/O EC2 Instance Type - hi1.4xlarge - 2 TB of SSD-Backed Storage

The Plot So Far
As the applications that you build with AWS grow in scale, scope, and complexity, you haven't been shy about asking us for more locations, more features, more storage, or more speed.

Modern web and mobile applications are often highly I/O dependent. They need to store and retrieve lots of data in order to deliver a rich, personalized experience, and they need to do it as fast as possible in order to respond to clicks and gestures in real time.

In order to meet this need, we are introducing a new family of EC2 instances that are designed to run low-latency, I/O-intensive applications, and are an exceptionally good host for NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB.

High I/O EC2 Instances
The first member of this new family is the High I/O Quadruple Extra Large (hi1.4xlarge in the EC2 API) instance. Here are the specs:

• 8 virtual cores, clocking in at a total of 35 ECU (EC2 Compute Units).
• HVM and PV virtualization.
• 60.5 GB of RAM.
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity with support for cluster placement groups.
• 2 TB of local SSD-backed storage, visible to you as a pair of 1 TB volumes.

The SSD storage is local to the instance. Using PV virtualization, you can expect 120,000 random read IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) and between 10,000 and 85,000 random write IOPS, both with 4K blocks. For HVM and Windows AMIs, you can expect 90,000 random read IOPS and 9,000 to 75,000 random write IOPS. By way of comparison, a high-performance disk drive spinning at 15,000 RPM will deliver 175 to 210 IOPS.

Why the range? Write IOPS performance to an SSD is dependent on something called the LBA (Logical Block Addressing) span. As the number of writes to diverse locations grows, more time must be spent updating the associated metadata. This is (very roughly speaking) the SSD equivalent of seek time for a rotating device, and represents per-operation overhead.

This is instance storage, and it will be lost if you stop and then later start the instance. Just like the instance storage on the other EC2 instance types, this storage is failure resilient, and will survive a reboot, but you should back it up to Amazon S3 on a regular basis.

You can launch these instances alone, or you can create a Placement Group to ensure that two or more of them are connected with non-blocking bandwidth. However, you cannot currently mix instance types (e.g. High I/O and Cluster Compute) within a single Placement Group.

If you want to run Micorosft Windows on this new instance type, be sure to use one of the Microsoft Windows AMIs that are designed for use with Cluster Instances:

You can launch High I/O Quadruple Extra Large instances in US East (Northern Virginia) and EU West (Ireland) today, at an On-Demand cost of $3.10 and $3.41, respectively. You can also purchase Reserved Instances, but you cannot acquire them via the Spot Market. We plan to make this new instance type available in several other AWS Regions before the end of the year.

Watch and Learn
I interviewed Deepak Singh, Product Manager for EC2, to learn more about this new instance type. Here's what he had to say:

And More
Here are some other resources that you might enjoy:

• Adrian Cockcroft wrote about Benchmarking High Performance I/O with SSD for Cassandra on AWS for the Netflix Tech Blog.
• Werner Vogels went into detail on the differences between magnetic disk and SSD, and talks about ways to use this new instance type for databases in his post, Expanding The Cloud – High Performance I/O Instances for Amazon EC2.
• The Hacker News discussion has a lot of interesting commentary.

-- Jeff;