This morning I saw a post by Om Malik at GigaOm, OpenStack Wants to Be Android of The Cloud. Very interesting article and it’s the first I’ve heard of OpenStack.
I’m a huge AWS fan and I think it is still be best product for the public cloud. However, it doesn’t do much in the private arena.
I’ve been following Cloud OSes for a while but that is a completely different than cloud infrastructure. I’ve also been following Eucalyptus and a few minor projects.

Eucalyptus has a lot of promise, but I am liking the true open source commitment of OpenStack.

Ok, now they’ve gone and done it. Amazon just doesn’t know when to quit. Is there a web service they don’t want to own? I josh. I like Amazon and like to see them put new and useful services out there and I am a big proponent of competition. I think competition is good for everyone as long as it doesn’t become predatory.

Now, Amazon has been going after Paypal for a while now with Amazon Checkout. But now, they have made this a super simple, no login, purchase tool with PayPhrase – the easy-to-remember shortcut for paying on Amazon.com and other websites.

AWS Price Decrease

Upcoming Price Changes

Effective November 1, 2009, we will be lowering prices for all On-Demand instances. The tables below show the existing and future On-Demand prices.

How often does a vendor REDUCE their prices, and thereby lowering your bill, without some nasty contract renegotiation? In my experience, never. One more reason to really like Amazon’s web services.
Starting November 1, 2009, EC2 prices are dropping 15% across the board (for linux AMIs). For a small image, that means a drop from $0.10/hour to $0.085/hour, large is going from $0.4/hour to $0.34/hour and the extra large are going from $0.8/hour to $0.68/hour.

Yep, looks like Amazon finally clued in to the fact that SimpleDB is pretty much useless for any mission critical work. They’ve added a new web services, Relational Database Service, abbreviated RDS.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.
Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database.

Generate Your Keys

Now that you have chosen your instance, but before starting you actually start your instance, you need to generate your key pairs. The keypairs are SSH keypairs. A later post will explain SSH in greater detail but the keys come in a pair because there is both public and private components.

SSH is a Secure SHell. This is a command prompt like a DOS box or a telnet connection. However, unlike DOS and Telnet, it is very secure. The private key is the local machine’s secret password. The public key is shared to any host that the local machine will connect to.

Choose an AMI

Amazon, and Amazon clients, are providing a huge variation of machine images. The short story is that you can choose between MS-Windows, Linux and Sun Solaris for your OS. The real story is that it is a bit more complicated than that.

The real question is what applications do you plan to run and what expertise do you have on hand or plan to hire? A quick example is a database like MySQL. MySQL runs on various operating systems. If you have Windows expertise, you may want to stick with windows.

Amazon is offering an exceptionally cool new feature called “AWS Import/Export”. Basically, you ship amazon your USB or eSata device and amazon will plug it into their hardware and load it.

With terabyte datasets becoming the norm, and petabyte on the way, I knew Amazon would eventually address this in some way. They did it faster than I thought they would.

You’ll pay per device and per load hour in addition to normal S3 storage and calls. You won’t pay any transfer fees.

This will be huge for people who want to make large data sets available (internally or externally for pay) and for CDN users.

Choose Your Tool

When working with AWS, you have a choice of tools. You should try several tools and use the one that works best for your needs. Some tools are provided by Amazon and others are provided by third party developers. I cover seven tools in chapters that follow this one but that list is not a comprehensive list. It’s just the tools that I have used myself and that I know for a fact do work.

Some services are more programming tools that anything else. SQS is like that. It is a queuing service that you will plug into your applications.

Linux Access with SSH & PuTTY

This post will (attempt) to explain what SSH and PuTTY are so that as a user you understand the terminology of AWS and so that you can be productive in the environment. This post will not attempt to make you an expert in SSH. For best practices in implementing SSH, I strongly recommend a book dedicated to hardening *nix (Linux, Unix, Solaris, etc).

SSH

In the early days, not that long ago really, of networking, very simple tools were used to work with remote computers: telnet as a console, ftp for file copying, rsh for remote command execution and others.

AWS Security

Data Center Security

Amazon is a well known entity and works to provide an extremely secure environment for your applications ans your data. Amazon is pursuing Sabanes-Oxley certification (by an external auditing agency) and SAS-70 Type II certification.

Amazon does not broadcast the locations of their data centers and physical security is a top concern for them. They have military grade external protections. Physical access to Amazon data centers controlled by a two-factor authentication and only those Amazon employees with an actual need are ever given access.

Hardware access is provided only to those administrators who directly require it and they must use their own SSH keys to access bastion hosts (kind of like cloud overseers).

Sign Up For AWS

First things first, if you don’t have an Amazon.com account, go get one. If you do have one, you can use the one you already have. Amazon offers personal and corporate accounts. A person may have both accounts and can choose which to use when purchasing items.

It also may make sense that all employees have a business only account that uses their work email to log into the service. That way you never have an issue where purchases or billing can go to the wrong place.

Or, you may do like I have done in the past, put all expenses on a personal card and expense them back to the company.

Amazon DevPay

Amazon DevPay is an easy to use billing system for AWS developers. Build your cloud application, allow users to sign up and use your application and let Amazon bill them for you.

DevPay is “AWS-Aware” in that it ties into the billing of AWS services. Instead of a user having to sign up for AWS and be billed separately, you can add in the AWS costs to your costs and just bill the users directly.

DevPay is web based and uses Amazon Payments. The web interface allows you to register your application and set your pricing.