Amazon’s Web Services in Silicon Valley

Once upon a time, EC2 instances were ephemeral - when a server instance was terminated, all local storage was lost. To work around this, you had to back up to S3 before termination, or rebundle your instance into a new AMI (Amazon Machine Image, or the virtual hard drive the instances boots off of).

Suffer no longer! Persistent storage has arrived with the Elastic Block Store. EC2 is now ideally suited for applications and databases like MySQL.

Here is from their press release:

With Amazon EBS, storage volumes can be programmatically created, attached to Amazon EC2 instances, and if even more durability is desired, can be backed with a snapshot to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Prior to Amazon EBS, block storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself so that when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. Now with Amazon EBS, users can chose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes can be created in any size between 1 GB and 1 TB, and multiple volumes can be attached to a single instance. Additionally, for even more durable backups and an easy way to create new volumes, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time, consistent snapshots of volumes that are then stored to Amazon S3.

Amazon EBS is well suited for databases, as well as many other applications that require running a file system or access to raw block-level storage. As Amazon EC2 instances are started and stopped, the information saved in your database or application is preserved in much the same way it is with traditional physical servers. Amazon EBS can be accessed through the latest Amazon EC2 APIs, and is now available in public beta.

I will try to come up with a speaker to present EBS at a future meetup. Stay tuned…

Two new types of instances are now available from Amazon Web Services: a medium instance at $0.20/hour with 5x the compute capacity of a small instance, and an extra-large one at $0.80/hour with 20x the compute capacity. These instances have less RAM, and disk space in return.

From the Announcement:

Amazon EC2 users now have access to a pair of new “High-CPU” instance types. The new instance types have proportionally more CPU power than memory, and are suitable for CPU-intensive applications. Here’s what’s now available:

The High-CPU Medium Instance is billed at $0.20 (20 cents) per hour. It features 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units Each), and 350 GB of instance storage, all on a 32-bit platform.

The High-CPU Extra Large Instance is billed at $0.80 (80 cents) per hour. It features 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), and 1,690 GB of instance storage, all on a 64-bit platform.

Yours truly will be speaking on the Cloud Computing panel of TiEcon, Saturday, May 17, 2008, between 12:30 PM and 02:30 PM, on the topic: Is Cloud Computing the Right Approach for Scaling Your Business?

From their description:

Our session theme for the Cloud Computing Luncheon is “Is Cloud Computing the right approach for scaling your business?”. Whether you’re launching a consumer internet startup or building an enterprise software-as-a-service application, making sure your application performs great and scales to the exponential growth that your business will see after launch is absolutely critical. No one wants TechCrunch to call them out for outages or a big customer to cancel an order because of slow performance. In addition, building the IT expertise and infrastructure to scale your application can be costly and complex. Enter the Internet giants - Amazon and Google today and potentially Microsoft and others in the future. Their business is all about large-scale infrastructure. Should you trust the lifeblood of your company to them or should you do-it-yourself in a traditional hosted or managed fashion? In this exclusive session, startup CTOs will present case studies on their experiences with cloud-based approaches versus traditional hosting. We’ll follow that up with interactive round-table discussions on various cloud offerings (storage, computing, database, etc.).

AWS has announced today AWS Premium Support, a new service providing support for both development and operational issues associated with AWS services.

The service includes a Silver tier with business day support and an online case management system, as well as a Gold tier with Click-to-Call phone support and 24×7x365 support availability.

Initially, support will be available for Amazon S3, EC2, and SQS (we will broaden this coverage over time). There are no annual contracts (pricing is monthly), and subscribers can submit an unlimited number of cases.

This offering will be attractive for businesses or developers who want a personalized support channel with guaranteed response times, and for those who simply want the assurance that they can reach somebody at AWS when they encounter an issue or roadblock. To learn more, check out the service description, or the press release.

AWS has established a Service Health Dashboard that reports the status of their services. Each service will be shown as green, yellow, or red, with additional information provided as relevant. As soon as AWS knows about a change in the status of a service, the color changes as appropriate. It is the single, authoritative source of information on the status of AWS.

The Service Health Dashboard is available free of charge at http://status.aws.amazon.com to all AWS developers. Great stuff!

Intridea announced the open sourcing of Scalr, a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment for EC2.

It has gotten its fair share of press, as seen here, here, and here.

The project is hosted on Google Code, and can be found here.

Are Cloud Databases for you? For April’s meetup, we will be talking all about developing on Amazon SimpleDB.

Agenda:

• The design philosophy behind SimpleDB’s scaling and consistency, by Sebastian Stadil, AWS developer
• Trade offs in choosing datastores, by Sean Knapp, co-founder Ooyala
• Transitioning from RDBMS to SimpleDB, by Alexander Tolley, founder of MyMeemz

Register for the SimpleDB User group here.

Amazon Web Services has just announced the availability of a fixed IP address for each AWS account. From the official announcement:

Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing, and now make it easy to host web sites, web services and other online applications in Amazon EC2. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your AWS account, not with your instances, and can be programmatically mapped to any of your instances. This allows you to easily recover from instance and other failures while presenting your users with a static IP address.

In addition, Amazon also introduced geographical dispersion to EC2 instances. This allows you to spread your EC2 instances to different datacenters to minimize risk of local failure. From Amazon:

Availability Zones give you the ability to easily and inexpensively operate a highly available Internet application. Each Amazon EC2 Availability Zone is a distinct location that is engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Previously, only very large companies had the scale to be able to distribute an application across multiple locations, but now it is as easy as changing a parameter in an API call. You can choose to run your application across multiple Availability Zones to be prepared for unexpected events such as power failures or network connectivity issues, or you can place instances in the same Availability Zone to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.

We finally have all our speakers for the Cloud Computing Demo Night at Tibco. Hurray!

Intro by:

• Barry Lynn, Chairman and CEO of www.3Tera.com

Demos by:

• Adam Wiggins: Heroku using Amazon EC2 - www.heroku.com
• Rod Boothby & Kristie Wells: Joyent - www.joyent.com
• Peter Nickolov, President and CTO: 3tera - AppLogic - www.3tera.com
• Ann Ruckstuhl: Zmanda using Amazon S3 - www.zmanda.com
• Edgard Capdevielle: Nirvanix - www.nirvanix.com

Please register here ahead of time for free entry. $15 at the door if you don’t

We have set up a new AWS training session on March 22. There are 10 seats available. Register here.

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Get Started using AWS!

Interested in learning to use AWS? We are organizing a hands-on training session in Palo Alto. The training will cover most of Amazon’s Web Services, including EC2, S3, SQS, and SimpleDB, in around 6 hours.

Email training@awsome.ws for more information.
AGENDA

Morning (9 - 12)

• Guided usage of EC2 and S3.
• Overview of SQS and SimpleDB
• Overview of how to architect a distributed application using AWS

Afternoon (2 - 4)

Guided application building using all aforementioned services