It is Friday afternoon inbox-clearing time for me! Before I abandon my keyboard for the weekend I want to share a few items related to our popular AWS Summit series.
For The Record The 2013 summits in New York, Australia, and London opened to capacity crowds in each city. The keynote and breakout talks at each event inspired a plethora of intriguing tweets and left the attendees with an even better sense of what AWS is about, how it has grown, what kinds of customers are using it, and what it can do. You can find the breakout presentations for New York and London at the following locations:
I'm tracking down the presentations for the Australia summit and will update this post as soon as I find the link!
Coming Soon Next on the agenda is the AWS Summit in San Francisco, scheduled for Tuesday, April 30th at the Moscone Conference Center. Advance registration is full, but you are welcome to camp out on the sidewalk and stand in line for walk-up registration. If your camping days are over or if you won't be able to make it to San Francisco, please register for the live stream and watch the keynote from the comfort of your desk. I will be in the audience at this summit; please say hello if you happen to see me.
Still on the agenda are Summits in Berlin, Tokyo, Mumbai, Paris, Delhi, Bangalore, Singapore, and São Paolo. If you'd like to attend a summit in one of these cities, visit the AWS Summit page and register now.
The Other Kind of Networking Please join AWS employees in San Francisco for a
Pre-AWS Developer Summit Networking event at Jillian’s (175 Fourth Street, San
Francisco, CA 94103) on Monday April 29th from 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM.
This is your chance to meet with AWS employees and other Summit
attendees. You’ll also be able to explore the exciting opportunities that
AWS has brought to the Bay Area as well as our other geographic
locations. Socialize and connect while enjoying food, drinks and a game
or two.
Several of my colleagues on the AWS
team are heading to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this week. So, if you are planning to be
there, stop by and say hi.
We have a booth and a few planned
activities:
AWS Booth Stop
by our booth and learn more about how AWS makes it easier and less expensive
for you to build, deploy, and scale connected mobile, social, and MMO games.
Solutions Architects and marketing will both be present to help you solve
problems and learn more about the AWS products that are right for your game. Stop by the booth and get a $50 AWS
credit. We’ll also have a code challenge
going where you can earn $250 in AWS credit for completing the challenge!
AWS Sessions Patrick Prendergast (AWS Games Evangelist) will be
presenting on the use of AWS in game development. He’ll talk about why today's mobile games are
services not products, and should be viewed as living entities whose life blood
is data. In his
talk you’ll learn how to hook up your game to a power source that will give it
life, namely, Amazon Web Services. Watch as our mad scientist breathes life
into a mobile game. At the end of this talk you too will have the power to
create games that live!
We're inviting all developers and architects to join us for a special event in London focussing on development, testing and architectural best practices in the cloud.
When and where?
Tuesday 9th November, at the Thistle Marble Arch Hotel. We'll get started at 2pm, and finish up with a beer at around 5pm.
What will be covered?
Working with on-demand, elastic infrastructure services is an effective way to decrease development times by reducing the heavy lifting of provisioning services, and allowing dev, test and QA teams to stay focused on the task at hand.
We'll be discussing application architecture, cloud best practices and security, along with useful development, deployment and testing tools that can help to get up and running quickly and a range of real world case studies. If you're looking for pragmatic guidance on working with the cloud, this is a good place to start. All killer, no filler.
Who is speaking?
I'll be there, introducing architectural patterns for the cloud and how to use elastic infrastructure to increase development velocity in teams of all sizes. We'll have some fantastic guest speakers from expert customers who will share their real world stories of working with AWS:
NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, NASA's lead center for robotic exploration of the solar system is doing some pretty extraordinary things with the AWS cloud. I had the opportunity to meet with their CTO to discuss some of the interesting projects they are working on. Like the early explorers of Deep Space, they were also early explorers of the AWS cloud. Cloud computing is high up on JPL CTO's radar and various teams are leveraging the cloud for various different projects related to missions.
They operate 19 spacecraft and 7 instruments across the solar system. Each instrument sends tons of data and images, which needs to be analyzed and processed. From one such instrument, they processed and analyzed 180,000 images of Saturn in the AWS cloud in less than 5 hours. This would have taken them more than 15 days in their own data center.
Last April, I was at EclipseCon and I was stunned when I saw the e4 Mars Rover Application, which was hosted in the AWS cloud, built by NASA folks, to control the movement of Mindstorm robots. I started to wonder what will be the result of when we combine the potential of NASA, the AWS cloud and robots.
The super smart folks at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (Jeff Norris, Khawaja Shams and team) developed a system that allows developers to interact with a Mindstorm robot in 4X4 Arena. The system exposes a REST API that takes commands from e4 clients and sends them to the app (RESTful Server running Equinox) hosted on Amazon EC2. The app stores all the commands (using conditional PUTs) in Amazon SimpleDB. The Poller application on the robot (Arena server) pulls the commands sequentially from a developer immediately by consistently reading from Amazon SimpleDB and executes the commands on robot which makes the robot move in the Arena. A sample command looks like “Set the velocity of the robot to 5 and move to the left”. In essence, developers will be able to send commands to the app on the AWS cloud and move the robot (in the arena). The system also stores all the logs, game queues, registration and scores in different Amazon SimpleDB domains. The RESTful server app is sitting in front of a fault-tolerant Elastic Load Balancer so that it can serve multiple concurrent requests and route traffic to multiple EC2 Instances. The setup is configured to use the Auto-Scaling service and is ready to scale in case they get sudden surge in traffic from clients. So, any developer can send commands using the API and make the robot move; the app will elastically scale with demand. Wait, it does not stop here. The Arena has a camera that is capturing and storing 4 images every second (4 FPS) to Amazon S3 (using the versioning feature) after processing them to find the robot's actual co-ordinates in the Arena. Millions of images get versioned and stored on Amazon S3 which can then be downloaded almost in real-time to get a “live” photo feed of the location of robot and its movement in the 4X4 arena. So, with this, any developer, from any where in the world, can actually write a program to send commands to the auto-scalable app hosted on EC2 and see the robot move in the arena.
In summary, large numbers of developers can write innovative clients to interact with the robot and because architecture is scalable and running on scalable on-demand auto-scalable infrastructure.
Kudos goes to NASA JPL team who not only conceived this idea but also built the system using the some of the most advanced features of AWS. They were already using some features which were released just a weeks ago for e.g. consistent reads and conditional puts from Amazon SimpleDB, versioning feature in S3 etc. They have what I call the "full house" of AWS that includes ELB, Auto-scaling, EC2. They are also planning to put together a video feed of the robot movements from the images and stream the video using CloudFront.
Architecture of the system is as follows: To entice developers to write innovative apps (client apps to manage robot movements, client apps to interpret the messages/logs from the robot and apps to move the robot itself to follow a path), they had announced a contest at Eclipsecon named "e4 Mars Rover Challenge". They made this system available to EclipseCon developers and opened up the server only to EclipseCon attendees using EC2 Security Groups and limiting the access only to EclipseCon CIDR IPs. I was amazed at the creativity. Contestants built innovative client apps ranging from iPhone Apps (that use the accelerometer to manage the velocity and direction of the robot's movement) to e4 intelligent clients that displays the telemetry. Winners have been announced. The event at EclipseCon was Mars-themed, and they have made the arena look like Mars with panoramas of Mars acquired by Spirit (Husband hill), and it had an orbiter, LED lights, and cool sound effects. This event was the ultimate crowd-pleaser at EclipseCon.
Imagine the potential when any developer can actually play with the robot from anywhere in the world and build innovative apps.
The fact that NASA engineers are utilizing cloud computing services to develop the contest brings a significant level of credibility to the whole notion of the cloud.
I was so excited after seeing the Arena at EclipseCon that I had to take the interview of masterminds behind this project. See the video below
Update! San Francisco and Silicon Valley had the dates reversed. Corrected calendar listed below.
We’re really excited to announce our AWS Start-Up Tour again in 2008, and this year we’re adding cities to include more hotbeds of innovation. The event is focused on the interests and needs of the startup community, so if you are an entrepreneur or startup leader this is an opportunity to hear about Amazon Web Services—and hear about the real-world experiences of others who already innovate on the AWS platform.
The tour schedule is as follows, with more details at www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=332775011. Click Here to RSVP, and we suggest an early RSVP to avoid disappointment caused by limited seating. By the way, there is no admission cost for the event.
San Francisco, CA, September 3
Silicon Valley, September 4
Los Angeles, CA, September 9
Salt Lake City, UT, September 10
Austin, TX, September 11
Toronto, Ontario, September 16
New York, NY, September 18
Boston/Cambridge, MA, September 22
London, UK, November 4
Amsterdam, Netherlands, November 6
Seattle, November 20
Last year’s tour featured a number of startups, such as AideRSS, Geezeo, Renkoo, SmugMug, Slideshare, Animoto, and Ooyala—just to mention a few. You can see their presentations here. Note that “here” is Slideshare’s site, which goes to prove that not only do startups innovate on AWS; they deliver compelling utility to others. These companies are the centerpiece of each event—as you can see in their presentations, each company has a unique and creative idea. And every one of them taught me something about implementing Amazon Web Services in the real world.
One of the major value propositions of Amazon Web Services is the utility pricing plan. That is, you only pay for what you use, and the cost is very low. Sometimes it feels like I am just saying that: not because there is any doubt that it’s true; rather because it’s difficult to produce metrics to back up assertions that “low cost utility pricing” is truly a game changer.
Then it hit me… Looking at the list of Start-Up Project presentations on Slideshare’s site, I realized that not a single one of these companies is “off the air”; that is, they all are still in business. In the Startup world that is nothing short of amazing—especially in this economy. (Some of the decks on Slideshare's site are not from last year’s startup events; however even those other companies appear to be alive and well.)
Amazon can’t take all the credit for this track record; however it does seem to be a solid data point that validates the value proposition.
I’m posting this from Boston, where I am attending the Red Hat Global Summit -- more specifically helping with a hands-on lab that teaches developers and IT staff how to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Amazon EC2. (It's really easy.) It’s been fun to meet enterprise developers from all over the world, and surprising to find out that no matter what country the developer is in awareness about Cloud Computing is high.
JBoss Perhaps you already saw the posts in other blogs… Red Hat announced that their JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is available in beta form as a service within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
Traditionally we think of Java application servers as building blocks that live in a hallowed enterprise data center; however with this announcement yet another one of those essential technologies is running fully supported by the vendor in the Cloud. In mission-critical applications support is essential--and for Red Hat products that means 24x7 operational support plus developer support. See www.redhat.com/support/policy/sla/production for a menu of offerings to choose from.
This is all quite amazing. Just over two years ago Amazon Simple Storage Service launched, followed in August of 2006 by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. In the short span of time since 2006 we’ve seen Cloud Computing grow from an idea to “of course we use it” for many organizations. With the advent of powerhouse enterprise infrastructure and applications, it seems inevitable that line-of-business applications in the cloud will become commonplace.
Getting started is easy, with just three steps:
Sign up for Amazon EC2
Purchase a subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Amazon EC2 or purchase a subscription to JBoss on Amazon EC2
Deploy your applications on the newly-minted application server; then optionally make a custom AMI from this image and save it as your own private version in Amazon S3.
Are you looking for an opportunity to really drill down thru the hype, and learn what Cloud Computing is all about? There are a variety of "Cloud Computing" camps, conferences, and panel discussions. This post summarizes relevant events that that I am aware of; there are probably more that I have not heard about. If you want to learn more about Cloud Computing, one or more might help you on that journey.
CloudCamp San Francisco – Summer 2008 Tuesday, June 24, 2008 from 5-9 pm in San Francisco, California Reuven Cohen of Enomaly is the sparkplug behind this event, which you can sign up for at upcoming.yahoo.com/event/759667. The event description is as follows:
CloudCamp was formed in order to provide a common ground for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing. Through a series of local CloudCamp events, attendees can exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supporting environment, advancing the current state of cloud computing and related technologies.
AWS Evangelist Jeff Barr will be in attendance.
An Evening in the Cloud June 9, 2008 in Boston This is a panel discussion featuring four users and representatives from four vendors, including Amazon's own Adam Selipsky. Organized and hosted by Mashup Camp founder David Berlind, this should be a very worthwhile evening event.
The Promise and Reality of Cloud Computing June 24, 2008 in Boston This is a panel discussion loaded with thought leaders in technology, including Sim Simeonov, General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners -- an old friend and someone who always has something interesting to say. Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google will also be a panelist.
Structure 08 June 25, 2008 in San Francisco, California The reason that CloudCamp San Francisco chose their date and location is that Structure 08 will be held on June 25th. The focus of the conference will be new platforms and new architectures, because to quote the event website "The platforms on which we have done business for over a decade are starting to provide diminishing returns; the smart money, meanwhile, is seeking new platform structures."
Amazon's CTO, Werner Vogels, will be speaking along with other industry leaders. Jeff Barr will take part ni a panel session.
High-Performance Distributed Computing June 25-27, 2008 in Boston The IEEE is conducting this High-Performance Distributed Computing Symposium which addresses the same issues that others call Cloud Computing. Their website says "The intent of this meeting is to provide a forum in which researchers report on new ideas and technical insights, application teams express the challenges of constructing wide area or scalable high performance applications, and technology creators report on future developments."
The World Summit of Cloud Computing Dec. 1-2, 2008 Hertzelia, Israel The World Summit of Cloud Computing has a lengthy list of presenters representing many of the influential organizations in the industry. Amazon Web Services evangleist Simone Brunozzi will be one of those speakers.
It's a busy month--Cloud Computing is definitely on the industry radar!
Are you a developer based in Portugal? I'll be in Lisbon on 13 November for the Codebits conference. I'll be there a day early (12 November) if you'd like to meet for coffee, or have me brief your team on Amazon Web Services, etc. Simply add your request to the AWS Evangelism Wiki at http://evangelists.wetpaint.com/page/MikeCulverEuropeFall2007.
Flash! Amazon Simple Storage Wins a Codie! I'm posting this from the Web 2.0 Expo, which can only be described as having incredible energy and way more people than I expected to see. However this piece of news comes from a nearby event.
The Codie Awards are the Oscars of the software business, and are voted on in two rounds: first by industry journalists, and then SIIA member companies. In 1986, the Codie Awards were established by the Software Publishers Association (SPA), now the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), so that the software industry could evaluate and honor each other's work.
This evening's award ceremony was held at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco, CA. This year’s winners were chosen from more than 1,197 nominations – the most in the history of the Codies, according to their press release.
Amazon is honored to receive this recognition for a service that now boasts over 5 billion objects stored in it.
If you are interested in the art of evangelism, there's an event coming up that you should attend. It's called GNoTECon (Global Network of Technology Evangelists Conference), and will be held in Santa Clara, CA on December 4th. Microsoft's Anand Iyer blogged about it recently, so I won't repeat everything here. In fact, this is a really short heads-up post to all of you who are evangelists, or passionate about technology. You don’t have to wear the title on your business card to be an evangelist; many of us spread the word about our passion in formal and informal venues.
Worth noting who will be speaking. In addition to our own Jeff Barr, Guy Kawasaki will keynote.
Learn the Benefits of Running a Private Social Network on AWS
[Online]
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET
Amazon Web Services and tibbr, an AWS Technology Partner invite you to learn how to foster innovation, improve customer support, employee motivation and breakdown departmental silos with a tibbr Private Social Network application running on AWS.
Register Now
Deliver High Performance and Scalable SQL Databases on AWS
[Online]
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NuoDB, an AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology Partner, invite you to attend this live webinar where you will learn how to use NuoDB to manage your data across multiple data centers and geographies to enable a highly available, secure and scalable system.
Register Now
Maximize Your Microsoft SharePoint Solutions on AWS
[Online]
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
8:00 AM PT / 11:00 AM ET
Join Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Capgemini, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, to explore how the latest technology innovations with Microsoft SharePoint may be combined to deliver maximum business value to your customers.
Register Now
Deploying Your Business Critical SQL Server Apps on Amazon EC2
[Online]
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SIOS Technology Corp, an AWS Technology Partner, invite you to attend this live webinar to learn key considerations for deployment of mission critical SQL Server applications to Amazon EC2.
Register Now
Manage Big Data Analytics Using SAP HANA One On AWS
[Online]
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET
Jump Start Your Big Data Analytics using SAP HANA One with RunE2E and AWS. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and RunE2E, an Advanced Consulting Partner, invite you to join this live webinar to learn how SAP HANA One provides the ideal platform to manage your Big Data solutions on AWS.
Register Now
By now many of you are aware that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fully supported by Red Hat on Amazon EC2. You can read more about the offering at 
Are you looking for an opportunity to really drill down thru the hype, and learn what Cloud Computing is all about? There are a variety of "Cloud Computing" camps, conferences, and panel discussions. This post summarizes relevant events that that I am aware of; there are probably more that I have not heard about. If you want to learn more about Cloud Computing, one or more might help you on that journey.
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