Cloud Computing Info

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.

Using and Managing Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I personally believe that AWS is perfect for any development and testing environment. Regardless of how sensitive your data is, you can build your applications and test them in a cloud environment using bogus data.

For production environments, the choice is much harder. Does the country(ies) you operate in have strict privacy, or data on-shoring, laws that would be impact your applications? If you can easily offshore your applications, you can easily use cloud computing.

Does the area where you work have reliable infrastructure?

Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk is an odd service. It’s called an “on-demand workforce” or peopleware. For large tasks that need to be automated but also require human intelligence, Mechanical Turk is the tool.

One of the examples Amazon uses is if you have 1,000,000 (one million) images that need to be tagged and categorized, you can use Mechanical Turk to “hire” 10,000 employees. You get to pick what you will pay and only those “turks” who want the work will sign up.

Amazon picks up 10% (additive) to whatever you pay someone.

Amazon FWS

FWS is the Amazon Fulfillment Service.

SimpleDB

SimpleDB was Amazon’s first available (in beta) web service. It is a neat feature but it has its downsides. First, SimpleDB is not a relational database. It is a name/value key pair. For simple lookups, it is highly reliable and scalable. For anything more complicated, it falls apart.

SimpleDB is not ACID compliant and has not referential integrity. For that matter, it has not schemas, tables or relationships. Amazon says that it “eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling”. Some things make me say, “Hmmmmm.”

SimpleDB structures data somewhat like a spreadsheet. Think of columns across and values down.

Amazon Flexible Payments

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS) is a set of web services that allow businesses or developers to bill users using the Amazon payment infrastructure (like a PayPal or Google Checkout). As a seller or a buyer, you can set limits on usage either globally or for specific senders and/or receivers. A gatekeeper component enforces the rules.

As a sender you can limit the number of transactions, transaction dates, dollar amounts, recipients and daily, weekly or monthly spending limits. Recipients can specify all of those and can specify allowable payment methods (credit card, bank transfer and amazon payments) and who pays the transaction fee.

One of the goals of FPS is to make micropayments effective and financially cost effective.

CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is Amazon’s Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN puts very large servers with high throughput at the edge of the network. That means that a CDN provider put cached data in multiple locations through out the network (internet). Requests for data are routed to a local server cache instead of the main server at a host. This improves performance, customer experience and possibly even costs (via lower bandwidth requirements).

An example would be a company that serves many pages to many users. Rather than have all of the pages stored in a central location and be accessed by many people all at once, the pages are distributed throughout the network and sit on many different servers.

Simple Queue Service (SQS)

SQS is Amazon’s message queuing service. It works much like IBM’s MQ Series, JMS or Oracle AQ. Pop in a message and one or more recipients can pop it out. SQS is completely open so any internet connected computer can call a web service and add or remove a message.

Because SQS is API based, you can write an interface to it in the language of your choice. There are several free Java, Ruby and PHP interfaces available (that I know of) with more coming.

I am a huge fan of Amazon EC2. It’s simple to use and very cheap. You can pick an existing machine image, fire it up and be on your way. If you add up the amount though, the cheapest machine image will cost you about $80 per month. How would you like to get something comparable (a developer style machine) for $20 per month?

Add in Rails, PHP, Java and even host based javascript support with SSH and SFTP access, root access and one button application deployment? All of this for about $0.65 per day? Yes, it’s true.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

For most of its life in beta, EC2 offered only two kinds of storage, AMI based transient storage and S3. The transient storage was mounted as a filesystem and S3 was used for backup. To save data during downtime for instances, data had to first be saved off to S3 and the instance brought down. When the instance was brought back up, data was restored from S3. It was a painful process.

Enter EBS, the Elastic Block Store.

Simple Storage Service (S3)

Cost

Storage is cheaper in the US than in Europe. If you are based in Europe, you may want to decide which is more important when getting or adding data: price or latency.

Table 3: S3 Storage Costs

Table 4: S3 Data Transfer Costs

Table 5: S3 Request Costs

These prices are accurate as of the time of writing them.