Amazon Web Services Blog

AWS Start-Up Challenge For 2009

We're kicking off the third annual AWS Start-Up Challenge now.

We're looking for the hottest and coolest start-ups and start-up ideas. Developers and entrepreneurs in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Israel are encouraged to enter for a chance to win $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, mentoring sessions from AWS technical experts, and AWS Premium Support Gold for one year.

To enter, fill out and submit the online application by August 26, 2009. The judging panel will review all of the application and choose the seven best, based on originality and creativity, likelihood of long-term success, monetization strategy, quality of proposal, and effective use of AWS.

The finalists will be announced in October. At that time we will post a video of each finalist and invite the public to vote for their favorite. Then we'll fly all of the finalists to Silicon Valley where they'll present their ideas to the judges' panel during the day, and pitch them to a live audience of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that night, where the winner will be chosen, annouced, and feted.

All runner-up finalists will receive $5,000 in AWS service credits; all entrants with qualified submissions will receive $25 credits.

The Challenge finalist with the most creative monetization model using the Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS) or Simple Pay from Amazon Payments will win $10,000 in combined cash and Amazon Payments credits. All finalists using these services will receive $2,500 in Amazon Payments credits. Read more here.

Questions? Check out the contest rules, review the prizes, and scan the FAQ. You may also want to watch the videos we made for the 2007 and 2008 finalists.

-- Jeff;

AWS in Education

When I entered college in 1978, the state of the art in campus computing consisted of a room full of IBM 029 Key Punch machines, an IBM 370 Model 168 mainframe, and job queues where my card deck would wait for hours in order to get a few seconds of precious CPU time. Today's kids have it a lot easier, first with desktop PCs and now with cloud computing providing them access to as many CPU cycles and as much RAM as they need for their class projects and research.

Our new AWS in Education program is designed to allow the academic community to take advantage of the Amazon Web Services for teaching and for research. Educators, academic researchers, students, and student entrepreneurs from all over the world can apply for free AWS usage credits in the form of teaching grants, research grants, and project grants. Read on to learn more about what we've put together.

 

We are supporting Researchers by providing selected research projects with grants. The grants offer free access to all of the AWS infrastructure services, giving researchers access to large amounts of compute power and storage in the AWS cloud. Researchers can focus on their work, avoiding the need to specify, procure, purchase, install, and operate hardware.

We will evaluate academic research support proposals from active faculty at accredited colleges and universities throughout the year here, review them with care, and make awards 4 times a year. The next deadline is May 15th; recipients will be notified on June 5th.

We've already made grants to the University of Oxford's Malaria Atlas project and the RAD Lab at the University of California Berkeley.

Educators have access to Teaching Grants so that they can use AWS in their courses on topics like distributed computing, artificial intelligence, data structures and the like. The grants provide educators with up to $100 in AWS usage credits per eligible student. Educators from accredited universities can apply for a grant by filling out this form. An active AWS account is a prerequisite; we can support one or two concurrent classes per educator.

The Teaching Grants can be used for coursework and for student projects. Supported AWS services include Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

Courses are already underway at several universities including the University of Maryland and Harvard.

Students, student organizations and students working on entrepreneurial class projects can apply for grants here. Individual students can use AWS for self-directed learning using our tutorials on asynchronous messaging, consensus algorithms with EC2, priority queues with SQS, data with SimpleDB, and REST with S3.

We're already supporting Project Olympus at CMU and Teams In Engineering Service (TIES) at UCSD.

I should also mention that we have full-time, intern, and co-op opportunities at Amazon, and that we'd be thrilled to bring in students who already have some significant working experience with AWS. After nearly seven years at Amazon I can tell you that this is really great place to work. You get to solve hard problems in an fast-paced while working with the best and brightest people in the industry.

Finally, IT Professionals on campus can also take advantage of cloud computing. We're working with a number of AWS education solution providers:

Moonwalk specializes in large-scale data management solutions. Their products are used in the Banking, Healthcare, Government, R&D, Education, and Aerospace indudstries.

Sonian provides educational institutions with a secure, scalable and affordable hosted Email Archiving and eDiscover service running within the AWS cloud.

 

I'm thrilled that we are able to support more of the great work that's taking place on college and university campuses around the world; I look forward to hearing about some great success stories!

-- Jeff;

Manage Amazon EC2 With New Web-Based AWS Management Console

Today we’re announcing the availability of the Web-based AWS Management Console, which in this first release provides management of your Amazon EC2 environment via a point-and-click interface. A number of management tools already exist: for example a popular Firefox extension known as Elasticfox; however as you read more of this post I believe you’ll agree that the new console is compelling--especially when it’s time to log in as a new AWS developer.

For starters, it’s easier than ever to gain access to your Amazon EC2 environment. The console provides access via your Amazon username and password. No more certificates or public/secret keys to manage! If you’re like me, I never seem to have my own computer at hand when I need to check the status of the Amazon EC2 farm, or for that matter when I need to launch a new instance. It’s a lot easier to log in with a username and password than to use those same credentials to retrieve my keys, configure Firefox (if it’s even on the borrowed computer) and then log in.

Then there’s the new point-and-click AJAX user interface for managing Amazon EC2 resources. No more page refreshes every time something updates; and a timer refreshes management console components, such as the status of running instances, every few seconds.

The AWS community creates an amazing selection of innovative Amazon Machine Images, or AMIs. In fact, the count is now a staggering 1200 AMIs and growing! That’s quite a menu to choose from—especially if you are a first-time user. The new Launch Instance Wizard walks you through starting your first instance; offering a short list of Linux and Windows server choices. Choose one of these AMIs, and then the wizard even suggests which ports to open in the firewall. It’s smart enough to suggest that you open SSH (port 22) for Linux images, and RDP (port 3389) for Windows instances. The wizard even suggests settings that restrict Amazon EC2 access to “your computer only”.

And as I hinted in the opening paragraph, this is just the first in a set of Console interfaces that will provide a UI layer on top of AWS infrastructure services. We’ll be adding additional Amazon Web Services in the future.

The console feature list is extensive, and provides intuitive management of all these things:

• AMI Management: browse and search AMIs, launch instances from AMIs, deregister and register AMIs
• Instance Management: launch, reboot, terminate, get console output, RDP/SSH help, etc.
• Security Group Management: create and delete security groups, add and remove permissions, configure firewall settings, open and close ports
• Elastic IP Management: create and release IP Addresses, associate IPs to instances
• Elastic Block Store: create, delete, attach and detach volumes. Take snapshots and manage snapshots.
• Key Pair management: create and delete public/private key pairs.

If you’d like to take a six minute tour of the console, I created a video (Flash format).

Finally, do you have a feature suggestion, or some other type of feedback? Feedback links are at the bottom of each page, and we welcome your input.

Mike

Paging Researchers, Analysts, and Developers

Hi, I am Deepak Singh, a business development manager at Amazon Web Services. One of my areas of focus is scientific computing on AWS, and I am guest blogging today about an exciting new initiative that will bring great benefit to researchers and scientists.

"Science was always about mashing up, taking one result and applying it to your [work] in a different way. The question is ‘Can we make that as effective [for] samples [of] data and analysis as it [is] for a map and set of addresses for a coffee shop?’ That is the vision." -- Cameron Neylon

One way to achieve Cameron Neylon's vision is to have access to public sources of data. This becomes even more powerful if scientists and analysts can use the available data to perform all kinds of computational and analytical tasks. At Amazon Web Services we believe that making it easy for people to get access to data spurs innovation. In line with that thinking, we have launched Public Data Sets on AWS, a new program that significantly lowers the barrier for researchers and data analysts to access and use some of the most commonly used data sets in their communities without the need to manage data within their own AWS accounts. Public Data Sets on AWS provides a convenient way to share, access, and consume publicly available data within your Amazon EC2 environment. Here is how it works

• Select public data sets will be hosted by Amazon Web Services for free as an Amazon EBS snapshot.
• You can access the data by creating your own personal Amazon EBS volume from a publicly shared Amazon EBS public data set snapshot.
•  You can then access, modify, and perform computations on these data sets directly using an Amazon EC2 instance and just pay for the compute and storage resources that you use.

Some of the areas we have found people interested in include scientific research, economic data analysis and market research. An example of a data set that we have seen interest in from the life science community is Ensembl. Ensembl is a joint project of the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and produces and maintains automated annotation on a number of eukaryotic genomes. Ensembl have made their MySQL databases for Ensembl release 51 available via the Public Datasets on AWS program and will continue to make updated versions of Ensembl available in the future. This data set consists of more than 650 GB of data and over 31000 files. People who want to use the snapshot will be able create an EBS volume from the snapshot, mount that volume on an AMI running MySQL, and configure the MySQL instance to point to the database files. In other words, you will now have the capability of doing bioinformatics in the cloud without needing to keep your Ensembl databases up to date.

The real power of these data sets comes from developers who can now provide tools and API's that can be used to analyze the data, or mash them up with other data sources. It will be interesting to see how people make use of the available data sets, what kinds of data sets will be utilized, and the kinds of data types being requested and submitted. With the availability of these initial data sets, and more in the future, we would like to invite developers to provide analysis pipelines, tools and API's that can be leveraged by the community and potential customers.

If you are interested in making a data set available as part of the Public Data Sets on AWS program, please submit your request on the form at http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/. We would love to hear from you.

Distribute Your Content With Amazon CloudFront

A few months ago I talked about our plans to create and offer a service for content delivery. That service is called Amazon CloudFront and it is ready now!

Like all of our other services, CloudFront was designed with ease of use in mind from the very beginning.  There are no minimum usage commitments, no monthly fees, and no need to even talk to us. Here's what you do:

1. Sign up for CloudFront.
2. Put your most frequently accessed static content into an Amazon S3 bucket and mark it as publicly readable.
3. Create a new CloudFront Distribution using a single REST-style POST call. Capture the domain name returned by the call.
4. Generate fresh URLs for your content using the domain name from step 3 and hand them out. By using our CNAME support you can even make the content appear as if it is coming from your own domain. You can associate up to 10 CNAMEs with each distribution.

CloudFront will take care of the rest. Requests originating anywhere in the world will be routed to one of 14 edge locations (8 in the United States, 4 in Europe, and 2 in Asia). If the content isn't already present at a particular edge location it will be fetched from S3 and cached at the edge.

You will be charged based on the number of requests that you make and the amount of data that you transfer. Pricing is covered in depth on the detail page. Because our costs vary by location, pricing for data served from edge locations outside of the US varies, and is currently slightly higher. You will also pay the usual S3 price for the "origin fetch" which take place when a requested object is transferred from S3 to an edge location, and for storage of the object in S3.

We are looking forward to seeing how this is put to use. It is certainly going to be used to host software downloads, frequently accessed website components, and media files. However, as is often the case with these new services, developers will find new and unique ways to put it to use before too long.

Our friends across the lake at Smartsheet have put together a nice worksheet which documents and generalizes the work that they did to support CloudFront in their own product.

Remarkably enough, parts of that website are already served up from CloudFront! You can use this worksheet to assign tasks to your developers, review the status of the tasks, and much more.

We've got plenty of CloudFront documentation including a Getting Started Guide,  a Developer Guide, an FAQ, and even a Quick Reference Card.

Tool and library vendors have been working to support CloudFront in their products. I'll update this post as I learn more.

Updates:

1. Amazon's Werner Vogels has written a bit more in his new post, Expanding the Cloud: Amazon CloudFront.
2. Thorsten from RightScale has written an informative review.
3. A beta version of  Bucket Explorer with CloudFront support is now available. More details here (pictured at right is their new support for creating a CloudFront distribution).
4. A new version of the S3 Fox Organizer, with CloudFront support and some other improvements, is now available.
5. The Digital Inspiration blog has a helpful post, How to Setup Amazon S3 with CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network.
6. A number of sites have already put CloudFront into action including Woot, Playfish Games, Paessler, Wolfire Games, and (as noted above), Smartsheet. Blogger Tim Linden is already using CloudFront to host his videos and static content.
7. The newest release of the Boto library now supports CloudFront. Boto provides a Python interface to S3, SQS, EC2, SimpleDB, Mechanical Turk, and CloudFront.

-- Jeff;

Force.com for Amazon Web Services

Today at Dreamforce 2008 Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services announced Force.com for Amazon Web Services, which is a toolkit that makes it easy for developers to build Salesforce applications that are partly hosted on Amazon Web Services. More information is also available on our Partner Page. If you are looking for the Amazon Machine Image (AMI), in Amazon's catalog of public AMIs, it's ami-e431d58d. This is the virtual server with the Salesforce toolkit pre-installed.

For example, it’s now easy to build a Salesforce application that stores images or documents in Amazon S3, or to run part of the application on Amazon EC2 using PHP. The toolkit has been packaged up as an EC2 AMI which you can get here    .

There are already a number of such applications listed in Salesforce's AppExchange, created before the toolkit became available. Here's a few examples:

Appirio Cloud Storage for Salesforce allows users to economically store unlimited numbers of files in Amazon S3 through the Salesforce interface. According to the product description, "It creates a Custom File Object in Salesforce that contains the name, description and other information including a secure link to the actual document. The end user still uploads and retrieves documents the same way they do today."

DoX for AppExchange allowing users to locate and share documents regardless of where they are stored--and one of those supported locations is Amaozn S3.

FTP Attachments is another example of this "store anywhere" paradigm, and once again Amazon S3 is one of the supported locations.

Imagine how much easier integrated tools make developer innovation!

If you'll be at Dreamforce, I'll be participating in a panel discussion titled "Clear the Cloud: How, When, and If Your Organization Should Leverage Cloud Services" today (November 3) from 11:30am - 12:30pm. In addition, we'll have a stand in Salesforce's pavillion in the exhibit hall. Love to meet you if you are able to stop by.

-- Mike

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;

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;

Oracle Enters the AWS Cloud

We've been working with Oracle to bring a number of their products into the cloud. The first fruits of this work are now ready: cloud-compatible licensing, EC2 AMIs preloaded with a variety of Oracle products, support programs, backup to the cloud, and a cloud management portal.

As more and more enterprises take a look at the Amazon Web Services, they invariably ask about packaged software, particularly databases. With this announcement, AWS users now gain access to a commercial-grade, brand-name database, along with the necessary tools and middleware needed to build and host heavy duty enterprise applications in the Amazon cloud.

So, what's available?

The Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager can now be licensed to run in the cloud on Amazon EC2. Customers can even use their existing software licenses with no additional license fees. Read more about cloud licensing here.

I should say a few words about licensing here because this question comes up all the time. The variability and flexibility of cloud-based licensing has perplexed users and vendors for some time now. Now that a large software vendor has made a clear statement of direction here, we should see more and more cloud-compatible licenses before too long.

These products, along with Oracle Enterprise Linux, are available in prepackaged, ready to run form, encapsulated within a set of free Amazon EC2 AMIs. Using these AMIs, new instances can be launched and ready within minutes. Of course, Oracle's development tools -- Oracle Application Express, Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, and Oracle Workshop for WebLogic -- can all be used to build applications for this new environment.

What does this mean? Instead of budgeting for and acquiring hardware, setting it up, installing an operating system and several layers of complex packages, you can simply launch one of these AMIs on EC2 and be up and  running in minutes. This is definitely no-fuss, no-muss application development and deployment.

But wait, there's more...

Oracle Enterprise Linux on EC2 is fully supported by Oracle Unbreakable Support and Amazon Premium Support. Once again, another potential adoption barrier has been lowered. If you've got a problem, Oracle and Amazon are ready to help out.

There's also a secure backup solution for database servers running on EC2 or within the corporate network. The new Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module allows customers to use Amazon S3 as a backup destination with virtually unlimited capacity, obviating the need to deal with local backup devices. The module encrypts backups and makes use of multiple connections to S3 to maximize throughput.

Need I even talk about how painful and expensive backup used to be? Buying expensive devices and media, keeping the media safe and secure offsite (yet still available if needed for a recovery), dealing with physical space issues, and 100 other things. Now, simply send your bits to Amazon S3 and forget about dealing with all of these other issues.

And if that's not enough, Oracle has also unveiled a new Cloud Management Portal. This is a free, web-based way to manage Oracle software running in the cloud.

These products will be on display at Oracle OpenWorld, which is taking place this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. If you are at the conference, please stop by the AWS booth to say hello and to learn more.

I'll be speaking at the Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara tomorrow (September 23) and will talk about this offering as well. Once again, say hello.

Here are some very useful white papers and other resources:

1. Oracle's Cloud Computing Center, chock full of links, demos, and information.
2. A data sheet, Oracle In The Cloud.
3. A white paper, Oracle Data Backup in the Cloud.
4. Oracle's Cloud Computing FAQ.
5. Dynamic demo showing how to launch the Oracle Database on EC2.

And here are the AMIs:

1. Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Express Edition - 32 Bit
2. Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Enterprise Edition - 32 Bit
3. Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Enterprise Edition - 64 Bit
4. Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Standard Edition/Standard Edition One - 32 Bit

-- Jeff;

We're Never Content

We've got something new and cool in the works and I'm excited to be able to tell you a little bit about it today!

Before the end of the year we are planning to release a new service for content delivery. This new (and as yet unnamed) service will provide you with a high performance way to distribute popular, publicly readable content to your customers all over the world, with low latency and high data transfer rates.

The new service was designed to meet the following goals:

• Allow developers and businesses to get started easily, with no dollar or volume commitments. Like our other services, this one will be pay-as-you-go.
• Be simple and easy to use. In fact, a single API call is all that's needed for you to start delivering your content.
• Work seamlessly with Amazon S3, for durable storage of the definitive versions of your content.
• Have a global presence, using edge locations on three continents in order to deliver your content from the most appropriate location.

You will start by storing your content in an Amazon S3 bucket and then marking the content as publicly readable. Next you'll make a single API call to register the bucket. The call will return a domain name that you'll use to refer to your content in your web page or application. When clients request the object via the returned domain name they'll be routed to the nearest edge location, for high performance delivery.

As I noted above, we plan to have this service available before the end of the year. If you'd like to be notified when we launch, you can express your interest here.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has also written about Expanding The Cloud.

-- Jeff;