Amazon Web Services Blog

Live Oracle Webcast and Virtual Lab - Powered by AWS

On Wednesday, May 27th at 8:00 AM PST, the Oracle Technology Network will conduct a Virtual Developer Day. Developers will learn how Cloud Development Environments can help enterprise Java developers create Java and Rich Enterprise Applications without having to download, install, or configure a development environment on their machine.

Attendees will receive technical training on Eclipse, Java caching, Java application servers, JPA, Java Server Faces, Portal technology, and more.

After the live video keynote from Oracle Senior Vice Presidents Steve Harris and Ted Farrell, attendees will have access to their own pre-configured lab environment running on Amazon EC2 in four hands-on labs. Attendees will also have access to a large library of prerecorded content.

If you'd like to attend you have to register ahead of time, and you also need to create an AWS developer account. Both are free.

During the event you will have access to a variety of social networking tools so that you can connect with the other attendees. Afterward, you will have the opportunity to pay for continued access to the EC2 environment.

-- Jeff;

Cloud Computing and Biomedical Research Roundtable in San Diego

Cirrhus9 (mentioned yesterday) and Pfizer are co-sponsors of a roundtable discussion on the topic of cloud computing and biomedical research. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels will be in attendance at this unique event, where they'll discuss the emerging demands of biomedical research and how they can be met using cloud computing.

The roundtable will be help at 2 PM on January 14th at the Pfizer building in San Diego.

There are just 7 seats left so you'd better go ahead and register now.

-- Jeff;

Trip Report: Around the World

Last week I came back from my India and Japan trip - one of my best trips till date. It was a complete round trip around the globe - I traveled from Seattle to Mumbai (via Atlantic Ocean), traveled within India (Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata), continued to Sapporo and Tokyo in Japan (via Indian Ocean) and then came back to Seattle (via the Pacific).

I met thousands of enthusiastic people, exchanged hundreds of business cards and made tons of new friends. Most importantly, I gathered and collated lot of feedback for the service teams. Hence, If you like to get your voice heard (Feature request, comment, complaint, question), catch an AWS evangelist - look out for evangelist wiki!

 

Seattle to Mumbai

Reliance funded BigAdda.com proudly hosts their entire music service  http://music.bigadda.com on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. I had a great conversation with their CTO, learnt a lot and got a great deal of feedback on how to improve our services.

Mumbai to Bangalore

Bangalore (India's Silicon Valley) had invited us for the Great Indian Developer Summit 2008. I think it was one of the best organized conferences I have seen in Bangalore. Speaker Concierge Service, Attendees to help you wrap your power cords when you are done and attendees to escort you. Also, I flew from brand new international airport (BIA) on the inaugural day. You don't get this "red carpet invitations" often. After meeting a variety of new startups that are using AWS, I gave a keynote talk at the SmartTechie Startup City Event which was attended by 50+ people. The power went off 3 times during the talk but I could feel the entrepreneurial energy in the audience. After the keynote, I gave a technical talk to the ACM Bangalore Chapter to small group of CS geeks.

Bangalore to Chennai

Chennai has, I would say, one of the most enthusiastic audiences in the country. While Bangalore is more enterprisey and old school, Chennai is more trendy when it comes to tech audiences. I presented to big group of Cloud-Curious audience to AWS Chennai Meet-up Group. Met several system integrators along the way including my favorite Cybernet SlashSupport Corp. who runs a 4500 employee payroll on Amazon EC2 in 72 hours and also have developed several neat solutions on the top of AWS platform. Local Press coverage of the event can be found here and here.

Chennai to Kolkata

I never had Kolkata on the roadmap. However, I was surprised to receive an invitation and even surprised to receive a warm welcome from Kaavo and Tathya Solutions. Kaavo with help of Tathya has built an excellent EC2 web console - IMODlive - similar to the ElasticFox in look and feel. I am crazy about Bengali sweets and also had fun along the way. Also, met enthusiastic young developers from Hispanito.com (Spanish Social Network) who are also seem to be based on Amazon EC2.

Kolkata to Sapporo

Sapporo is one of the largest cities in Hokaido and I would say one of the best places to visit in northern Japan. I keynoted to a group of 350+ people at the invite-only Infinity Ventures Summit 2008 conference organized by Infinity Ventures Partners. Japan has a growing entrepreneurial community. Learnt a lot of Japanese on the way.

Sapporo to Tokyo

Tokyo was fun. I met several system integrators like Nihon Unisys. Nihon Unisys' Executive Vice President gave talked to more than 1000 people about how they are embracing the cloud. I then, presented to a group of Web 2.0 enthusiasts at the Tokyo2Point0 User Group. It was hi-tech - fiber-optic, live streaming, 3-XL projection screens in a trendy fusion bar.

And finally back to Seattle.

All I can say, there is amazing amount of entrepreneurial enthusiasm in air everywhere and lot of people are excited about Cloud Computing. This is the best time to learn more about Cloud Computing as its very easy to start a new company now.

It was a complete circle around the globe. I gained a day in my life. ;-)

Evangelists have a high carbon footprint ;-), Hence, if you would like to know more about AWS and/or if you like to get your voice heard to Amazon, one of the best ways is to catch an AWS evangelist as one of our jobs is to listen and gather valuable feedback!

- Jinesh

On Condor and Grids

There is lots of buzz about Hadoop and Amazon EC2—and of course there should be, given all the great projects such as the one that the New York Times one, where they converted old articles into PDF files in short order at a very reasonable cost.

There’s a second environment you should know about, although the buzz level is a bit lower. (That might change.) Condor is a scheduling application that is commonly used in HPC and grid applications. It can also be used to manage Hadoop grids, and manages “jobs” in much the same manner as mainframes—that is, you submit a job to Condor, along with metadata that describes the job’s characteristics. Then Condor finds suitable resources to allocate for the job. Note that Condor and Hadoop are trying to solve things in independent ways--with the result that they overlap in some ways, while doing unrelated things in some cases.

This week I attended Condor Week at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Condor Week is an annual event that gives Condor collaborators and users the chance to exchange ideas and experiences, to learn about latest research, to experience live demos, and to influence our short and long term research and development directions.

If you are interested in large-scale grid computing, this approach is worth a serious look. There are two active projects that implement Condor on Amazon EC2, and of course that’s why this blog entry is being posted.

Cycle Computing offers Amazon EC2 plus Condor as an integrated platform, in addition to supporting other underlying computing resources. Their software automates Condor grid management, including monitoring, configuration, version control, usage tracking, and more. At the conference Jason Stowe from Cycle Computing made a very strong case for using Amazon EC2 instead of a traditional grid environment. Jason’s presentation is available for download at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/CondorWeek2008/condor_presentations/stowe_cycle.pdf.

Red Hat’s approach integrates EC2 directly into the Condor code base. The result is that an Amazon EC2 instance is the “Condor Job”, and in that manner they are able to manage the entire life cycle of an EC2 Instance. In some cases the entire Condor pool is running on EC2, and in other cases EC2 augments an existing pool. All of this work was done by collaboration between the University of Wisconsin (Jaeyoung Yoon , Fang Cao, and Jaime Frey, along with Matt Farrellee from Red Hat. They plan to integrate Amazon S3 as a storage medium in the near future.

One thing seems certain: on-demand virtualization brightens the lights in Grid Computing City, because organizations who could not afford a grid suddenly find themselves with both affordable infrastructure and powerful tools to manage their new-found tool.

-- Mike

Friday Lunch Meetup in New York

I'll be in New York this coming Friday, the second leg of a trip to Washington, DC and New York.

Via Twitter, Tristan Louis suggested a lunch meetup and I was happy to oblige. We'll be meeting at the Union Square Coffee Shop at 12:30 on Friday the 2nd of May and you are welcome to come along.

I will have a couple of hours open in the afternoon and would be happy to have a private meeting or two as well. Just leave a note in the Wiki and send a confirming email to evangelists at amazon.com.

-- Jeff;

Amazon Web Services in Japan and India

My last trip to India was in the pleasant winter and it was packed with action. I met with Wipro, Infosys, Patni, Accenture, Symphony and various other small and large companies. It was 14-day 5-city tour with stops in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad. Met a lot of people and made tons of new friends. This time, I decided to visit India during the red hot summer and get some heat!

I will be in India from May 19 to June 1 to speak at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2008 in Bangalore. I would love to meet with you if you or your organization is using Amazon Web Services and/or would like to know more about computing in the cloud. I would love to talk to outsourcing companies, consulting companies, system integrators, enthusiasts and passionate programmers.

Please feel free to schedule your meeting using our user-generated calender - Evangelist's Wiki for this trip.

I will be traveling to Japan from June 3rd to June 11th before returning back to Seattle. If you are in Sapporo or Tokyo and would like to schedule a meeting/presentation, use the Japan Wiki Page.

As always, we are always eager to meet you and learn more about your use case and dive into technical discussions.

-- Jinesh

New Zealand Trip Report

If there was ever any doubt about the power each of us have, this week proved that one person makes a real difference. I am midway two-week trip to New Zealand and Australia, and writing this post from New Zealand. The person that I’m talking about is Nick Jones—let me explain how this evangelism trip came about, and along the way I’ll talk a bit about what I found once here.

How the Trip Came About
Amazon’s own Jeff Barr came up with an idea that has changed the course of evangelism—at least here at Amazon Web Services. We have a wiki at evangelists.wetpaint.com that allows community members to request that we come to them, rather than some centralized process where we decide who “should” hear about Amazon Web Services. And so in this case Nick posted a request that Amazon send a Web Services evangelist down under. I replied to Nick to say “sure, but not just for one meeting”. Must have been a challenge—check out the wiki page for this trip and you’ll see just how dense the schedule is. Nick wasn’t responsible for every meeting; however a large percentage of these meetings in both New Zealand and Australia were due to his efforts.

The Result
Lots of opportunity to meet with the academic/research community (Nick works at the University of Auckland), government agencies, startups, and individual developers on this trip. It’s amazing what you learn—especially when others set the agenda. I am going to describe just a few highlights, which will shortchange others who reinforced the same point; but given the number of meetings it’s the only approach possible.

New Zealand is a long way from traditional tech centers, and there is a single undersea cable that serves the country (although a second one is on the way). The result is that Internet access is expensive, with a wholesale cost of $0.03/MB to communicate with North America. So the research community makes use of KAREN, a network that is funded by the NZ government and that eliminates that transit fee—as long as the other end has a peering agreement. None of this seems to affect the local startup scene though, as I'll describe shortly.

	Every city seemed to have a take-charge person. In Christchurch there were two: with Robin Harrington taking the lead at the University of Canterbury, and Christopher Sawtell leading the charge for the Linux group. Robin set up a series of sessions with researches and faculty on campus. It's always exciting to see people think about what these new Web service offerings afford in the way of potential and cost savings. And I was able to learn more about the university and what their needs are. The campus is on a very large piece of land; yet the actual buildings are compact so that there is lots of very lush green space. Kiwis are definitely into "green"--in both the garden and environmental sense.
	As mentioned, the other Christchurch leaders were long-time officers of the local Linux user group. They went well out of their way to accommodate my schedule and arrange a meeting on a non-normal night. Then they even invited me out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Great place to eat! We met on the university campus; you know it's a comp sci department when the name on the lab door says "Crypt 2".
The Kiwi research community has access to the highest number of supercomputers per capita in the world. These were used for at least part of the rendering of Lord of the Rings, a fact that many techies say “thank you” for.
	Wellington has a vibrant Web community, and seems to be a hotbed of tech startups. The original intent was that I'd present to a few local startups. The event kept growing on its own until Catalyst Consulting stepped in and agreed to host it. Then it got bigger yet, presenting venue challenges... Don Christie from Catalyst posted a blog entry about the meeting, where I presented to a group of well over 100 people (believe that it was closer to 150), in a packed incubation center. Wow, what energy! What the folks in the room didn’t realize was that from the balcony outside the meeting I was able to see the neighborhood where I lived briefly many years ago (in the background of this photo). What a distraction! Another blog post by a different attendee is here.
	In Hamilton I met with one of New Zealand’s largest Web design firms. They have all sorts of innovation in their reference list; not least of which was setting themselves up as an Internet registrar. Like so many others, they were enthusiastic and excited about the potential of Web-Scale Computing. At this point I also switched to renting a car--was a combination of destinations in suburban areas and a late-night travel schedule to Auckland. The rental vehicle reminded me that New Zealand uses the other side of the road, and that I should too...

Finally, Auckland is a more traditional business community but still full of tech startups. Had an opportunity to meet with some of them as well. In both Wellington and Auckland I realized how hands-on the government is about promoting their software industry as an export. The folks in NZTE (New Zealand Trade & Export) were impressive--unlike a typical government agency these staff members come from the software industry, and have a very realistic view of the world. There are plenty of success stories in New Zealand's software industry that don't involve government agencies, of course; however being promoted as an export industry definitely provides lift.

I finally met Nick on Thursday.

Who wants to be next? Nick and the rest of the New Zealand community set the bar...

-- Mike

The Best time to be a developer is Right now!

Last week I spent my time evangelizing in Texas (Austin, Fort Worth, North Dallas, Richardson and Bryan) - Met tons of cool developers, hackers and enthusiasts. I met the most extravagant variety of people in this one trip and as I write this blog post, I tell myself "The best time to be a developer is Right Now" after looking at so many new ideas being implemented, so many new tools to work with, so many new development platforms to choose from. So If you are a developer, give yourself a pat on the back. Now it’s the time.

I started my trip on a direct flight from Seattle to Austin. If you haven't had the eternal divine pleasure to sit next to a "big fat roaring engine" few inches away in MD-80 flight that has excellent view from its window (see on your right), you are certainly missing it. I was stuck in that bucket seat for 4 hours. Still vibrating from head to toe, I somehow managed to get out, take some rest and drive to Austin Ruby on Rails User Group.

Despite the fact that most of the developers in the area were "rubied out" after 48-hours of hardcore Ruby at Lone-Star Ruby Conference that night, there were around 30-40 people in the audience. I like Rails and all the goodies I get for free (mainly the plug-ins). Hence my talk was mainly focused on - How you can build a processing pipeline (using Amazon Infrastructure "As A Service" services) using the power of Rails and it's beautiful plug-ins (especially attachment_fu and activemessaging). The best part of the meeting was Steve Odom's presentation about ElasticRails plugin - A small Rails plug-in that allows you to quickly deploy any "recipes" on Amazon EC2 from within Rails environment.

Steve's presentation was embedded with tons of experience and he shared his experience of using Amazon EC2 with the group. Steve articulated one fact very nicely; He said "lack of database persistence in Amazon EC2 is my friend" - It is forcing him to make the right design choices i.e. Forcing him to think of "Plan B" ahead and upfront in the game (for eg. doing backups periodically). In case something goes wrong, he is already equipped and prepared. This is different in case of traditional hosting where we assume things won't break and when they actually break, we go berserk. This is a good overall design principle "Always design for failover" because hardware does fail, outages do occur, disasters do come. Nobody can stop that. We could certainly mitigate the risk by designing our software for failover (for high-availability), redundancy (for high-reliability) and loosely coupled (for high-scalability) right from the start. I learned a lot at this Austin RoR group.

When I arrived in Austin, it was hot, humid and sticky. When I left it was windy accompanied by severe thunderstorms. Look what an evangelist can do to the weather ;-)

I reached DFW the next day and rushed to Fort Worth .NET Users Group meeting in Fort Worth. Enjoyed the enthusiasm in this group as I saw more than 70% of audience asking cool questions. If they ask questions, that means they were not sleeping, which implies the 2-hour presentation was not boring.

Next Stop was North Dallas .NET Users Group. Amazon Web Services spoke to around 80+ .NET developers about How Amazon Web Services can be used in .NET Applications. I demoed the What's the Tune Application that uses Amazon ECS, Amazon S3 and Amazon Mturk in a very innovative way and also demoed my S3Whois App. So many new applications are being built with new technologies all around the globe.

At Night, I met a small group from the North Dallas Linux Users Group for coffee at Café Brazil. It is a nice place to hang around.  Informal casual conversation with really smart Perl Hackers. Met one of the lead developers in Perl6 Parrot project and some people who take pride in having home-datacenters.  I had heard of home-offices but never heard of home-datacenters. Really cool!

I flew to AggieLand - College Station and Bryan to meet with a bunch of designers and developers who had invited us to come and speak to their group. These college grads have started something really innovative - Similar to "incubator" concept, "The Creative Space" is space (yes! physical space) for start-ups. If you have an idea, you are in near Bryan, TX, this is a place to check out. They share all the resources from a Rails Developer to a designer, from artists to painters. Multiple people work on multiple concepts/ideas.  Dollar Store across the street for supplies and office space in Bryan Downtown makes it the right place for people with high-energy-and-low-ego who want to get their ideas turn into action. At 7:00PM, AWS presented to a bunch of high-energy students at TAMU campus. 

So, overall, it was an action-packed week in Texas. If you are a developer, I would highly recommend to join the group that interests you in your area. I met Hackers, coders, professors, students who proudly call themselves as developers. It's exciting times. Hence I say "The best time to be a developer is Right Now!"

Comments are always welcome!

-- Jinesh

Reminder: The Startup Project Coming Right Up

UPDATE: Amazon.com Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is expected to join Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr in a visit to the Silicon Valley reception on Wednesday night. Their schedules are tight, but they are both going to try.

A few weeks ago Jinesh blogged about the Startup Project, which will be held in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, and Cambridge/Boston. Today's post is a reminder--in fact, more like a last call for this week's events in California. There are only a few seats left for each of the California events; and I suspect the East Coast Startup Projects will be in similar shape very shortly.

As Jinesh said in the original blog post, if you are founder of a start-up company or thinking of starting one this event is for you. It is an excellent opportunity to learn how Amazon Web Services empowers entrepreneurship, innovation and sustainable growth. It's also a great opportunity for you to meet our team--and for us to learn about you and your ideas.

You can learn more and RSVP for the location closest to you as follows:

• Silicon Valley, Wednesday Sept 12
• San Francisco, Thursday Sept 13
• New York City, Wednesday Sept 26
• Boston, Thursday Sept 27

-- Mike

Coming to Minneapolis and Eau Claire

A reminder that if you're in the Twin Cities or Northwest Wisconsin, I'll be visiting for two user group presentations.

On Wednesday, September 5th, I'll be visiting the Twin Cities Linux Users Group. (http://www.tclug.org/), which meets in Minneapolis on the University of Minnesota campus.

On Thursday evening, September 6th, I'll travel to Eau Claire, and hang out with the Chippewa Valley .NET Users Group, Eau Claire, WI (http://cvnug.wi-ineta.org). By the way, I still have an open day on Thursday, if you'd like to meet me for coffee or want a presentation to your team at work.

As always, you can keep up with our travels at http://evangelists.wetpaint.com.

-- Mike