Amazon Web Services Blog

Plat_Forms Contest in Germany - Not Your Typical Hackathon

We’re excited to work with the Plat_Forms programming contest, an effort organized in Berlin, at Freie Universität this spring.

 

Focus on Scalability & Cloud Architectures
The Plat_Forms contest has been around in Germany since 2007. Its hallmark is celebrating the diversity and strength of various development languages (Java EE, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.). This year, the focus of the contest is entirely on cloud computing and scalability. Ulrich Stärk, the program organizer, explained “AWS is technology agnostic, thus allowing for a fair comparison of the individual platforms. Apart from that, AWS is the market leader in IaaS services, thus making a perfect choice for us since we can expect that a lot of developers have either used AWS already or are interested in trying it now.”

The Coding Challenge
Unlike the typical hackathons or programming contests where developers can enter with radically different apps, Plat_Forms is all about giving everyone the same coding challenge. The organizers have established a set of requirements for the contest task and plan on evaluating all entries holistically, including against principles such as application usability and robustness.

Some of the considerations required on the submission include:

• It will be a web-based application, with a simple RESTful web service interface.
• It will have challenging Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements such as number of concurrent users it needs to support, guaranteed response times, fault tolerance, etc.
• It will be some kind of messaging service, where users can send each other messages.
• It will require persistent storage of data.
• It may require integration with external systems or data sources, but using simple and standard kinds of mechanisms only (such as HTTP/REST).
• It will require scaling by operation on multiple nodes (computers), which must use a stateless operation mode (i.e. if a single node fails the system overall, the application must not fail and must not lose data).
• It must run completely on the Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

Bonus!
For Germany-based programmers entering the contest, there is an extra bonus prize of $1,000 in AWS credits to the winning teams, in addition to the prestige and prizes provided by the contest itself. The deadline for entering has just been extended to March 16, 2012 and the actual coding challenge will take place in April.

To learn more (guidelines, judging criteria, process etc.), please visit the Plat_Forms website and let us know if you enter! :)

-rodica

DCI - The Dog Computer Interface

One of the great perks of working at Amazon is that you get to work with a bunch of great people and also with their dogs!

As previously noted in our blog, Rufus is a valued part of our Developer Relations team. He's a Rhodesian Ridgeback owned by Martin Buhr. Martin works on business development for Amazon EC2 and as such he's been pretty busy lately.

Rufus joined our team two years ago when he was just a puppy and he's grown considerably since then. Or, in the local vernacular, he's scaled up!

A couple of weeks ago Martin and I arrived at the office at about the same time. He was trying to get Rufus to settle down. Rufus wasn't cooperating and Martin told me that Rufus was a bit bored. Jokingly I suggested that we could probably train Rufus to do some Mechanical Turk HITS. We both laughed it off and that was that.

 

A few days later I mentioned this idea to Mike (once again in jest) but as we discussed the idea the conversation quickly went from silly to serious. Unsure of the level of cognitive skills that we could expect, we figured that Rufus and his kin could probably handle simple HITS which required him to discriminate between two alternatives, such as a dog bone vs. a soda bottle or a bird vs. a cat.

At this point we were still at the hypothetical stage but in our rarefied little world it was starting to seem like we could actually pull this off. Mike has tackled some pretty cool electrical and electronics projects in the past (including the nifty digital to analog converter pictured at right) and it was good to have his expertise available.

 

Mike and I batted around a few ideas for the DCI (Dog-Computer-Interface), starting with some sort of brainwave sensor feeding into the converter. We prototyped this and tried it out on Rufus. He was surprisingly patient. We fitted the sensors into a tin-foil hat which we molded to fit Rufus' head.

We uploaded the raw data into a 10 node cluster of EC2 instances in an attempt to make heads or tails of it but our analytic skills were not up to the task and we had to abandon this aspect of the experiment and head back to the drawing board.

 

Jinesh suggested a more direct Yes/No interface and volunteered to build it for us. Starting with a pair of Staples Easy buttons, he wired up a clean and straightforward input system that would accommodate Rufus' paws. This seemed like a much better solution and we were pretty optimistic about it.

Martin had been humoring us in the background but he was starting to think that it might work. We started to give some consideration to types of HITS that Rufus could do. Martin said that Rufus was pretty good at identifying bears, so that seemed like a good start, even if it was of somewhat limited value. This was a proof of concept, after all.

 

We hooked the buttons up to a spare laptop and propped it up on a box so that Rufus could reach it without too much trouble.

 

Jinesh created some "Is This a Bear?" HITS and we were just about ready to go.

Martin used up almost half of a box of dog biscuits in the process of training Rufus to look at the screen. He's a smart dog, but there were all sorts of distractions and it was tough to get him to focus on the task at hand.

 

Believe it or not, he actually got pretty good at hitting the proper button before too long. As you can see from the picture at right, the Easy buttons were just right for his gigantic paws.

Once he got going, Rufus was pretty good at identifying the bears in the picture, with an accuracy rate in excess of 80%. Admittedly, the task itself was of limited utility but that wasn't the point.

Rufus has yet to notice that we've recycled the HITS and he now spends an hour or so each day happily sorting out the bears from the non-bears.

 

This was a really fun project and we learned a lot by doing it. As you can see from the picture at right, Jinesh and Rufus certainly became good friends.

We've actually got a number of great job openings one the Amazon Web Services team right now; if you like to work hard and play hard, and hang out with great people and their dogs, you should check out the Amazon Jobs site today.

 

We had a lot of fun putting this little experiment together and we'd like to thank Martin and Rufus for all of their help. You can only pull off something like this once a year, and today was definitely the day to do it.

-- Jeff, Mike, and Jinesh

Vote For Your Favorite AWS-Powered Sites

Voting for the 2008 Webware awards is now underway. Please consider voting for your favorite AWS-powered sites including these. Click Site to visit the site or Vote to begin the voting process.

• Animoto - Site - Vote
•  Basecamp - Site - Vote
• Coghead - Site - Vote
• G.ho.st - Site - Vote
• iLike - Site - Vote
• Jamglue - Site - Vote
• Jungle Disk - Site - Vote
• Justin.TV - Site - Vote
• Mogulus - Site - Vote
• Second Life - Site - Vote
• Thinkfree - Site - Vote
• WordPress - Site - Vote
• Zillow - Site - Vote

If your site has been nominated and you are not on the list, leave a comment, include a link to the voting page and I will update this post!

-- Jeff;

Happy Holidays

Within our Developer Relations team at Amazon, any public picture of a team member is considered fair game for use in parodies. Look what just showed up in my Inbox:

Mike, Jinesh and I, would like to wish you some Happy Holidays and offer our thanks for reading (and responding to) our blog posts. We love to hear back from our readers.

-- Jeff;

PS - I should point out that this is a really fun place to work and that we do have some great job openings.

Tracking AWS Releases

We were sitting around the office the other day, munching on some M&Ms and lamenting the fact that we had to actually go and check the various AWS Forums each day in order to stay abreast of the newest releases of each product. We knew that each forum had its own RSS feed, but the idea of having to check 10 feeds each day for announcements certainly seemed sub-optimal.

Minutes later, Jinesh had put together a Yahoo Pipes application to do the heavy lifting. His application pulls in the requisite feeds, finds the announcements, and combines them into a single result feed for easy reading. Just pop that feed into your newsreader and you'll always know what's happening.

If you want to use RSS to do something similar, take a look at Brian and Craig's article, Generating RSS Feeds with the Amazon E-Commerce Service.

Nice work, Jin!

-- Jeff;

Monday Links

Here are some interesting Monday morning links:

• Smugmug's Don MacAskill has posted the slides from his recent ETech talk. Per the slides, they now have 192TB of photos stored in Amazon S3! Don's deck also documents cost avoidance of $692K to date. After reviewing several different approaches to combining local storage with S3, Don discusses performance and reliability, and also talks about his plans to use Amazon EC2 to handle image processing for 500,000 to 1 million photos per day.
• The newest release of TeamDirection stores project information in S3. Check out the podtech video to learn more, then go for the free trial download.
• SmartSheet is another cool and functional application built on top of S3 and EC2. There's another podtech video (how does Scoble do it?). SmartSheet also won the Best in Show award at the recent Under the Radar conference.

Enjoy,

-- Jeff;

Links, Links, and More Links

I'm attacking my inbox with a shovel; here are just a few of the things I found within:

• First off, Rich Lafferty enumerates the most expensive things at Amazon. Fortunately, the $40,000 Super Bowl XL Opus MVP Edition is available for free shipping. There are 3 in stock as I write this, so be sure to order soon!
• WeoGeo's WeoCeo product simplifies the management of Amazon EC2 instances. As the configuration file notes, "Utilizing a statistical reporting daemon on the WeoCEO clients, the WeoCEO server can calculate statistics on the overall system load. WeoCEO is designed to work in a homogenous networking environment, where each image launched is responsible for largely the same tasks."
• David Berlind asks, "Is it time to throw away your servers?" You will have to watch the video to see what conclusions he reaches. Entertaining and informative, not to mention colorful!
• Smartsheet.com is an innovative task, project, and process tracker that just happens to use Amazon S3 for storage and Amazon EC2 for processing. They are also using the Amazon Mechanical Turk to solicit suggestions for new types of project templates. You can find the HIT here.
• Blake Schwendiman wrote to tell me about his Instant Amazon gadget for the Google desktop and the Google Desktop/Sidebar.
• I'm not sure how to describe Justin.tv! Justin is wearing a video camera and recording every minute of his life, and posting the videos to this EC2-powered site.

-- Jeff;

Blah Blah Blah -- IT Conversations Podcast

While I was in Utah last month, Professor Phil Windley interviewed Doug Kaye and I for his Technometria podcast. You can listen to the podcast here.

We covered Amazon S3 and EC2, and then moved on to Doug's new podcast processing architecture, which uses EC2, S3, and also SQS to support the entire Gigavox Lite system.

This podcast closed a pretty interesting loop for me. Way back in 2003, I was one of Doug's first interview subjects. At that time the word I believe that podcast had yet to be invented, and people raised a skeptical eyebrow when he talked about recording and distributing interviews as MP3 files. Today, this is a very common use case and it is clear that Doug was way ahead of his time.

-- Jeff;

Snowbooks - Second Life Bookstore

Last week I received an invitation to check out the Snowbooks store in Second Life.

I spent some time wandering around earlier today and liked what I saw. Here's a full report. Snowbooks is a UK-based publisher and also an Amazon Associate. Their Second Life stores provides access to their own titles and to titles from Amazon.co.uk . As far as I know they don't use any Amazon Web Services yet; this is the Second Life equivalent of an Associates site with static pages featuring products chosen by hand.

True to its name, the Snowbooks store is located in one of the colder parts of the Second Life world, with year-round snow:

Just like a physical bookstore, they have featured a particular book, and they also note that they are affiliated with Amazon:

The winter theme is maintained in the chalet-like design of the store:

Inside, there's a good selection of books, all set up for casual, comfortable browsing:

There's even a meeting room upstairs:

Because Snowbooks is also a publisher, they need to meet with authors and other related parties from time to time. Conveniently enough, they have an Editor's Office with regular office hours:

You can visit the Snowbooks store in Second Life by clicking here. You can read more about the store at the Snowbooks site. You might also want to track down PK Rimbaud, the Snowbooks representative in-world.

This is all pretty impressive, and to me it shows off some of the interesting ways that a real-life brand can be brought into a virtual world.

If you are doing something interesting in Second Life with our services, please do feel free to track me down. I am Jeffronius Batra.

-- Jeff;

5 Minute AWS Presentation

I was lucky enough to receive an invitation to present at the first-ever meeting of Ignite Seattle this past December. This event attracted lots of Seattle-area technical folks for an evening that was both fun and informative.

We started out the evening by forming into teams to build bridges from popsicle sticks and hot glue. This was a great way to break the ice and to get people talking, sharing, and working together. Once the bridges were built each one was tested. The winning bridge was able to bear the weight of 5 people and used an astounding 998 popsicle sticks.

It was then time for the presentations. The presentations were done in a slightly modified Pecha Kucha format. Each presenter has exactly 5 minutes to present 20 slides -- just 15 seconds per slide. Of course I was slated to speak on AWS, and spent plenty of time earlier that day planning, rehearsing, trimming, and timing my talk. 5 minutes may not seem like very much time, but it was actually enough!

In the space of 5 minutes I was able to introduce the audience to AWS, talk about a number of individual services, and to show screen shots of a number of cool AWS-powered applications. Here's my video:

Click To Play

Under more normal presentation rules, it would take me an hour or more to cover this material! It is a very worthwhile exercise to take your message and hone it down to the bare essentials. A lot of what might be considered essential material in a longer presentation actually seems like fluff when you only have 5 minutes. In a longer time slot I always take the time to answer questions and to interact with the audience, and I also like to do demos if possible.

Sites and applications mentioned in the presentation include LivePlasma, TV Mojo, The DVD Wars, S3 Ajax Wiki, S3 Explorer, S3 Fox, Backup Manager, Smugmug, Webmail.us, Powerset, RenderRocket, and Casting Words.

There were a total of 25 presentations that night, and they were all quite interesting. The great thing about this format is that there's no time to get bored. If your aren't interested in a particular presentation, you can just wait a few minutes for the next one. One very interesting consequence of this format is that the medium and the message become somewhat conflated, and the dense, breathless, high-energy style of the presentation actually seems to lend credibility to the very things that the presenter is describing.

You may also enjoy watching the other videos.

The next meeting of Ignite Seattle will be held on the 13th of February. Perhaps I will see you there.

-- Jeff;