Cloud Computing Info

I just got an email from Amazon Web Services.  In honor of their 3 year anniversary, they are offering 3 cents per GB data transfer (that’s external transfer) instead of the normal 10 cents per GB.  This is planned to last for 3 months.  If this was IN and OUT, this would be a significant savings for companies using S3 to serve up large files.  Still, while not as big as it could be, it does mean that this is the time to get all of your files loaded up.

I don’t.  Vendors will do what vendors have always done: sign up for the latest and greatest media attracting stunt and then do exactly what they want anyway.  We are way too early in the era of cloud computing for any kind of standards.  When you try to design standards you end up with the Ada programming language.  Technically accurate but totally ignored.

The best standards are best grown, over time and from real world experience.  In a few years, when experienced professionals start publishing best practices, then I will be interested.  Until then, it’s just so much open spew.

Simple Storage Service (S3)

Security

Write and delete access to buckets and objects is controlled via Access Control Lists (ACL). You can assign read permissions to any object to specific users. You can also make an object public to grant access to anyone.

Transfer into and out of S3 can utilize SSH which will encrypt data. This prevents any “over the wire” interception of your data. Data at rest is not encrypted and Amazon recommends that users encrypt any sensitive data with their encryption tool of choice.

Simple Storage Service (S3)

The AWS S3 service is an API driven storage service. The API provides get, put and delete. Data is stored using a bucket concept that is not unlike directories and sub-directories. A bucket can hold one or more buckets and one or more objects (i.e. files). You can nest buckets as many levels deep as required by your application or other needs. Objects can be up to 5GB per and you can store an unlimited number of objects.

At the top level is a global bucket. All S3 accounts share the global bucket.

Sizing and Costs

EC2, like the other services in AWS are pay as you go, pay for what you use, services. As I mentioned above, you basically pay for the power you use which is a CPU per hour charge, bandwidth and storage. Linux and Windows guests have a different pricing menu. I am listing the prices current as of Dec 2008. I recommend you always check at aws.amazon.com to verify current pricing before making a commitment.

Instead of buying or leasing a specific type of hardware (that you would then be responsible for upgrading over time), AWS computing power is based on an EC2 compute unit.

Have you been wondering what the differences between S3 and EBS are? I recently gave a high level overview of S3 and I plan to do one on EBS. I also plan to follow with a detailed looked at both S3 and EBS.

In the meantime, Cloudiquity has posted an entry, Differences between S3 and EBS. This is a nice overview. It provides some excellent technical details as well as some pricing info. Well worth a read.

LewisC

Technorati : amazon, aws, ebs, s3, storage

From the Cloud Computing Blog.

If you haven’t already, you should read page 1 and page 2 first.

MobiPocket

The free MobiPocket ebook reader used to be produced by a German company but they are now an Amazon subsidiary. The Mobi format is what the Kindle uses as the default format for all of those ebooks. That means that for a Kindle, if you want to view PDFs, you need to convert them to Mobi format. Fortunately, Mobi provides that functionality.

I have been using mobi on my blackberry for a long time now. I mainly used it to read free science fiction books the Baen Free Library.

From the Cloud Computing Blog.

If you haven’t already, you should read page 1 first.

BeamReader

BeamReader, formerly BeamBerry, is produced by SLG Mobile. BeamReader was originally created BeamBerry as a hosted service. It would translate the PDF on a server and stream the output to your device. SLG still offers a service like this (for PDFs and many other document types) and even offers a print service. The newer BeamReader provides a native PDF renderer and they claim to be “the first full fidelity native PDF reader for BlackBerry”.

Unfortunately, I had some major problems with BeamReader while trying to do this review.

From the Cloud Computing Blog.

Today’s post is a little bit different than my normal fare. In my quest for mobile productivity, I have been looking for a way to carry my technical library with me where ever I go. While I can upload my PDFs to various Cloud OSes, and I do, I still have a need to access my documentation while disconnected. Plus, I still have to view those documents when I may not have a computer available (although with my EEE PC 1000h, that is rare these days). That leaves me with my phone.

I recently upgraded to a blackberry bold.

Cloud Computing Info

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Transient Storage

The storage that comes with an AMI is called Transient Storage. That means that when the instance is stopped, the storage goes away. Any data or files saved when the instance was running is lost. This is by design.

To persist your data between sessions, you have two options. During most of the beta period, the Simple Storage Service (S3) was the only internal method of persisting data. S3 cannot be mounted as file system so it served as a backup service only.

Shortly before the beta period ended, Amazon added the Elastic Block Store (EBS).

Cloud Computing Info

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Security and Security Groups

Security is one of the most important, if not the most important, aspects of any important application. If you are thinking about running any kind of a mission critical application in the cloud, security should be a large part of your research.

AWS has been independently certified as Sarbanes-Oxley compliant and has passed a SAS70 audit. Amazon’s physical data center security follows established norms and is routinely audited.

On the software side, Amazon maintains a separation between host operating systems (those that Amazon are responsible for) and guest operating systems (the AMIs).

Cloud Computing Info

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Elastic IPs

Elastic IPs are a very neat feature of EC2. An Elastic IP is a configurable IP address assigned to your account. Unlike the rest of the features in AWS, you pay for any elastic IPs that you have allocated but not used. Amazon doesn’t want customers hoarding, and thus wasting, this resource. If you set aside the IP and use it, it’s free. If you set it aside and just keep it hanging around unused, you’ll pay a small monthly fee.

These IP addresses are connected to your account so you can assign them to any instance you might be running.