If you are a software developer and didn’t read this paper you should. This paper is targeted towards cloud architects who are gearing up to move an enterprise-class application from a fixed physical environment to a virtualized cloud environment. The focus of this paper is to highlight concepts, principles and best practices in creating new cloud applications or migrating existing applications to the cloud. Most importantly, the paper discusses some specific strategies on how to architect your application to leverage the benefits of the cloud benefits. Although you’ll see some specific tactics on how to use different Amazon Web Services features and services (the paper is written by Jinesh Varia, Web Services Evangelist at Amazon), the principles can be applied using any cloud providers (Windows Azure).

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Under the pressure from Windows Azure release in a week, Amazon unveiled today a new AWS SDK for .NET Developers providing .NET developers the libraries, code samples, and documentation needed to build an AWS-powered application using any programming language capable of making .NET calls including C#, Visual Basic, Windows PowerShell, and other compliant languages. .NET developers get a special treatment with a dedicated .NET Forum and a special Windows & .NET Developer Center.

The SDK includes: Continue reading…

Today Amazon released its answer to SQL Azure, the hosted cloud database offered by Microsoft. The newest service form Amazon, the Amazon Relational Database Service, or Amazon RDS for short, now in beta, makes it easier for you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. You get direct database access without worrying about infrastructure provisioning, software maintenance, or common database management tasks.

Using the RDS APIs or the command-line tools, you can access the full capabilities of a complete, self-contained MySQL 5.1 database instance in a matter of minutes. You can scale the processing power and storage space as needed with a single API call and you can initiate fully consistent database snapshots at any time.

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Amazon is adding a new feature which significantly improves the flexibility of EC2’s Elastic Block Store  (EBS) snapshot facility. You now have the ability to share your snapshots with other EC2 customers using a new set of fine-grained access controls. You can keep the snapshot to yourself (the default), share it with a list of EC2 customers, or share it publicly.

The Amazon Elastic Block Store lets you create block storage volumes in sizes ranging from 1 GB to 1 TB. You can create empty volumes or you can pre-populate them using one of our Public Data Sets. Once created, you attach each volume to an EC2 instance and then reference it like any other file system. The new volumes are ready in seconds. Last week I created a 180 GB volume from a Public Data Set, attached  it to my instance, and started examining it, all in about 15 seconds. Continue reading…

The AWS Management Console now has complete support for Amazon CloudWatch. You can enable CloudWatch for any or all of your EC2 instances using the console and data will be available in a moment or two. You can select one or more running EC2 instances to see the CloudWatch data in graphical form. You can observe CPU utilization, disk reads, disk writes, and network traffic (both in and out). If you select more than one EC2 instance, the console will automatically display aggregated values.You can also get a larger and more detailed view of the data.

Here are some pictures of the console in action: Continue reading…

Amazon SQS launched over three years ago and is the quiet workhorse behind many of the highly scalable applications running on Amazon EC2.

Today Amazon is rolling out some important new features for Amazon SQS including availability from within our EU region, control of access permissions, and more control over the visibility timeout.

Starting today, a complete, self-contained instance of Amazon SQS is available in Europe. You can now choose to build Amazon SQS-driven applications entirely based in Europe or span regions (US and EU) in order to provide geographic diversity.

AWS is also introducing additional permission features that control access to Amazon SQS and to each of its fundamental actions on a very fine-grained basis … Continue reading…

Amazon announced today the public beta of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research. Amazon Elastic MapReduce lets you focus on crunching or analyzing your data without having to worry about time-consuming set-up, management or tuning of Hadoop clusters or the compute capacity upon which they sit. Continue reading…

Amazon Web Services Team just released an important new feature for Amazon SimpleDB. The new BatchPutAttributes function allows you to create or update up to 25 SimpleDB items at a time, in transactional fashion.

This new call is more efficient than a series of individual PutAttribute calls since one call incurs far less connection latency than a series of 25 calls. This new feature is available today and you can read about it here.

Also, based on feedback from the SimpleDB user community, they have increased the limit on the number of items per domain from 250 million to 1 billion.

Amazon Web Services is discontinuing the Alexa Site Thumbnail service. The service has been providing developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the pages of web sites that were stored in Alexa’s index. New subscriptions are no longer being accepted, and existing subscribers will only have operational access until June 12, 2009.

Alexa Site Thumbnail was a paying service (developers were charged $0.0002 / thumbnail URL returned i.e. $0.20 per 1,000 thumbnail URLs) but in an e-mail sent out to developers Amazon admits that it never really took off and that the company will do the smart thing and focus their resources on more popular services.

The best alternative out there is PageGlimpse. It provides an easy to use API, a Wordpress plugin,  .NET library and many other tools and features for FREE.

DirectThought, a New York Based company, is working on a native iPhone application, named directEC2 to access and control Amazon’s EC2. You’ll be able to keep tabs on your EC2 resource (instances, volumes, etc.) using this application running on your iPhone. Because it is a native application, it doesn’t rely on any other server. All you rely on are your iPhone, Amazon’s servers and your internet connection. This application is under development and has been tested on the iPhone and iPod touch.

This application uses a toolkit called cTypica which is an Objective-C version of the popular typica Java toolkit for AWS. This will be released under the Apache 2.0 License to enable others to gain access to Amazon’s service from their own iPhone applications.

There’s no indication when the application will be released.

Bellow are some screenshots of the application in action. Continue reading…