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).

Continue reading…

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 announced a significant price cut in its EC2 service offerings. The one-time fee for all Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances will now be 30% cheaper than previously offered.

The reserved instances program essentially allows users to make a one-time payment for instances, ‘reserving’ them in order to receive discounts in subsequent hourly usage rates. The program was implemented earlier this year as an effort to reduce the cost of cloud services for frequent users, and with the announcement it appears that Amazon is looking to lure customers into long term service deals.

More from the press release:

Starting today, we have lowered the one-time fee for all Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances by 30%. We continuously strive to be more efficient, and to pass cost savings on to you in the form of lower prices. With Linux Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, you could reduce the cost of your instance usage by up to 56% compared to an On-Demand instance. When using Reserved Instances, you pay a low, one-time fee to guarantee capacity for each instance during a 1 or 3 years period. You then have the option to run that instance whenever you want, at a greatly reduced hourly rate. You can find more information about pricing on the EC2 Detail Page and Reserved Instances on the Reserved Instances Detail Page.

It is easier and easier easier for programmers to build sophisticated, scalable, and robust web applications using AWS, and now it became even easier. Amazon just released a new set of features to complement its EC2 offerings: load balancing, auto scaling, and cloud monitoring are now available.

The features work together to help you to build highly scalable and highly available applications.

Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon EC2 capacity, Auto Scaling dynamically scales it based on demand, and Elastic Load Balancing distributes load across multiple instances in one or more Availability Zones.

The measurements collected by Amazon CloudWatch provide Auto Scaling with the information needed
to run enough Amazon EC2 instances to deal with the traffic load.

Auto Scaling updates the Elastic Load Balancing service when new instances are launched or terminated to automatically scale the load-balanced capacity.

You can instantiate, configure, and deploy these important system architecture components in seconds. More details… Continue reading…

HDCloud, developed by Diversion Media, a New York-based startup that creates and operates consumer media properties, is offering automated, high-definition video encoding in the cloud for large-scale media companies. 

Whether you need 400 kpbs Flash, 1.2 Mbps MPEG-2, or 5 Mbps h.264, HD Cloud can produce high-quality outputs. Input formats range from MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 to AVI, Real Media, and 3GP. Output formats include H.261, H.263 (Spark), H.264, MPEG-2, and 3GP.

HD Cloud also provides RESTful API for integration with other systems, including VMS providers, file transfer accelerators, CDNs, security vendors, and legacy transcoding systems.

This is another success story in the “cloud”. By leveraging public and proprietary cloud technologies, HDCloud is able to scale horizontally without limits. Remember, video processing requires lots of processing power and results must be delivered in timely manner. 

Tatum Lade, co-founder and CTO of Diversion Media, was kind enough to provide some insights on the technologies used by HDCloud:  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…

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…

Feeling the pressure from Microsoft’s Windows Azure, Amazon works hard on releasing GUI tools for managing their services. Until now, the only GUI way for managing services were a couple of Firefox plugins - Elasticfox for managing EC2 and S3fFox for organizing S3 and CloudFront. However, Amazon just released, in BETA of course, its brand new AWS Management Console, (using Yahoo’s YUI framework, using JSP in the backend).

The initial release of the AWS Management Console provides a graphical user interface for Amazon EC2, with additional Amazon infrastructure services scheduled to be added to the console in the coming months. You can create Elastic Block Store volumes and assign Elastic IP’s to your instances.

The features planned for the future releases look promising: Continue reading…

After more than two “azure” months, with lots of new stuff to learn, a whole new alphabet soup to digest and a dozen or so Microsoft evangelists trying to navigate us through the plethora of “cloud services” that seem to pop up every day from Microsoft’s software making machine, I believe something is not right with either the way the information is presented to the public or with the overall Microsoft strategy. Let me explain.

First of all, everybody is using nowadays “cloud” to describe anything that runs on the web. Cloud is the new buzzword, and Microsoft jumping on the bandwagon doesn’t make things any better. Before Windows Azure release, it was simple to explain “the cloud” to any CEO - we had Amazon with storage and computing power, we had Google with their app engine and some other smaller “cloud computing” offerings. Everything else was SaaS - Software as a Service. After Windows Azure release, looks like everything Microsoft releases is a “cloud service” - Exchange, Sharepoint, Office, Live Services etc. - just adding to the confusion about what “cloud computing” actually is. I believe Microsoft should have come up with a different buzzword to describe their Software as a Service/Software + Services offerings, one word, not many. Continue reading…