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.

According to Amazon,

PayPhrase links your Amazon.com payment and shipping information with a simple phrase that you choose. With PayPhrase, you no longer have to register or share credit card information with multiple web sites.

With Amazon Checkout, my info is stored and some kind of token is exchanged with a vendor so my personal information doesn’t need to be. I like Paypal and use it fairly heavily when paying for things on the internet. I also like Amazon and even have an Amazon credit card. I think I buy something from them at least once a month. Now, I don’t even need to login.

The cool thing about PayPhrase is the control you can put on an account. You can give your kid access and set spending limits and have it send you order approval notifications. Man, I need that for XBox Live! You can use it to give your kids an allowance. Set them up with a PayPhrase using your credit information and then set a monthly limit. Sweet!

There is no way that PayPhrase is as widely supported as Paypal right now. Amazon CheckOut market share has got to be minimal compared to PayPal. Have to see how well it spreads over time. For a developer or merchant already on AWS, it’s kind of a no brainer to include this. They already have some merchants using PayPhrase: DKNY, Jockey, Patagonia, Buy.com, J&R Electronics, and Car Toys to name a few.

If you sign up, the system will generate a phrase for you. I didn’t like mine as there is no way I would ever remember it. They also list some suggestions but I didn’t like those. Almost every suggestion included the word “bread”. They trying to tell me something? I swear I’ve cut back on the carbs!

It must be at least two words and contain no numbers. This is NOT a password. It is a pass phrase.

Once you’ve chosen your phrase, you also have to enter a pin number (4 digits). When complete you verify your credit card and payment info and then you are the proud owner of a new PayPhrase.

Be interesting to see if they make any kind of a dent in PayPal. This is a service of Amazon Checkout which is a sub-service of Amazon Payments. I don’t believe PayPhrase is an additional fee on top of CheckOut. CheckOut has very reasonable pricing.

Take care,

LewisC

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? It doesn’t matter if Amazon has 99.99% uptime if your provider is down 50% of the time. You can easily use something like replication and keep a copy of your application’s data within your own data center but if you make that investment, do you really want to run anything in the cloud.

My suggestion to get started would be to use AWS to host a development effort first. Get comfortable with the quirks and gotchas of remote applications. Familiarize yourself with the additional security you will need when running in the cloud. Look at encrypting your data on disk. Amazon will encrypt the data as it travels over the wire.

The need for system administrators and DBAs does not go away by moving to the cloud. It really doesn’t change their jobs much at all. Most modern admins rarely touch the hardware directly anymore, anyway.

Once you’ve decided that it is for you and you have chosen your pilot project, you will need to take the actions described below.

A note to remember as you are working through this book. You only pay for what you use. When you run an instance, you pay for the CPU time that you use. When you use S3 or EBS, you pay for storage (and bandwidth in S3). You pay for Elastic IPs only if you allocate one and don’t attach it to a running instance.

Technorati : amazon, aws, cdn, cloud computing, data, web service

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. Akamai does this for Yahoo and many other companies. Limelight is another very large competitor in this space.

CloudFront does the same thing and uses S3 storage as the central repository. Upload the files that you want served to S3 and sign up for CloudFront. Call and API and then use the domain name assigned by the API in your web pages. Amazon will automatically replicate your data (identified by you) to multiple edge locations world wide and re-route requests to the users nearest edge location.

Cost

Storage is cheaper in the US and Europe than in Asian locations. You pay normal S3 prices for the storage of your source files. You don’t pay for storage in the edge servers. Instead you pay for the data transfers out of the Amazon network.

Table 6: CloudFront Data Transfer Costs

You also pay for data requests (each access). Edge servers only support GET requests.

Table 7: CloudFront Request Costs

These prices are accurate as of the time of writing them. As always, verify before making a decision.

SLA

Amazon does not currently have an SLA for CloudFront. I would expect that to change at some point but you should keep it in mind when choosing you content delivery network.

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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. EBS is a persistent storage mechanism, like a hard drive, that can be mounted by an instance and will retain its data even when the instance is brought down.

Amazon estimates that EBS storage is more reliable than commodity hard drives with an annual failure rate of 0.1 – 0.5%. EBS is replicated (mirrored) within an availability zone for redundancy. You would need to lose the entire availability zone to lose your data.

An EBS volume can only be attached to a single instance at a time but like a USB drive, you can attach it to one instance, copy data to it and then attach it to another instance. An easy way to move large volumes of data.

An EC2 instance can attach many EBS volumes. An EBS volume can be allocated from 1GB to 1TB. If you need 10TB, mount 10 1TB volumes or 20 500GB volumes. You are limited to the max number of volumes you can use (20) but you can always request that number be increased should you have a business reason to do so.

Performance of an EBS volume is engineered to be better than the internal AMI volumes. It’s sort of like attaching to a very fast, very expensive SAN. Because they are raw devices, you can attach multiple volumes and stripe across all of them. This will improve IO.

An added durability feature is volume snapshots. You can tale point in time snapshots of your entire EBS configuration and the data will backed up to S3. Snapshots are incremental so only data that has changed is backed up. This saves time and money (less in S3 charges). Snapshot storage in S3 is stored compressed to take even less space.

You can also create new instances from a snapshot. If we refer back to that catalog application I mentioned earlier, you could add new catalog instances by creating a new instance and attaching to a copy of your master instance. S3 supports lazy loading so you can start the instance before all of the data is copied. If any data is requested before its restored, S3 will immediately serve that data up so that it looks to the file system as if it was already available.

Cost

EBS storage costs $0.10 per GB per month of allocated disk space. 10GB for a month costs $1.00, 100GB would be $10.00 per month. Very, very cheap storage for such a high performing and reliable storage system.

IO is billed at $0.10 per million IOs per month. Amazon provides an example of a medium sized web site that does 100 transactions per second. Adding that to a month works out to about $26.00 per month. Not bad.

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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. As always, verify before making a decision.

SLA

Amazon warrants a 99.9% uptime on a monthly basis. This is a significant uptime percentage. If S3 is not able to meet the uptime guarantee, Amazon will credit your account for the month of service interruption. If the percentage of uptime is between 99% and 99.9%, you will get a 10% credit. If the uptime is less than 99%, the credit is 25%.

You can read the SLA in detail at http://aws.amazon.com/s3-sla/

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Remember, this is just INto the data center.  Transfer between S3 and EC2 (and EC2 instances) is free.  Transfer out will cost the normal amounts.

Here is the full email:

Dear AWS Developers,

Three years ago this month, Amazon Web Services launched Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as “storage for the internet,” providing “highly scalable, reliable, low-latency storage at very low costs.” Since that time, Amazon S3 has experienced dramatic growth, expanded into Europe, and lowered pricing multiple times as we’ve been able to achieve ever greater economies of scale and pass them on to our customers. Today, the service has grown to store over 52 billion objects and serve over 1 trillion requests per year from customers in over 90 countries. Whether you’ve used Amazon S3 to back up files, host static website content, securely share files with your external business partners, or store scientific, financial, or website data for processing via Amazon EC2, you’ve contributed to this growth.

We owe the success of the service to you, and on the 3rd anniversary of Amazon S3, we’ve decided to say “thank you” with a few more “3s.” We’ll be offering “data transfer in” to Amazon S3 for only $0.03 per GB (vs. the standard $0.10) for the next 3 months, April through June. As always, data transfer between Amazon S3 and EC2 within regions remains free, and all other pricing dimensions are unchanged. At the beginning of July, prices will return to normal, so if you’ve been thinking about moving a new project into Amazon S3, now might be the time. More information on Amazon S3 and its pricing can be found here: aws.amazon.com/s3.

After three years, we continue to be excited and honored to be on this journey with you. Thank you.

Sincerely,

The Amazon S3 Team

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. Your buckets can be located in North America or in Europe. Any objects created within that bucket will exist in the bucket’s regional location.

Access to objects is via HTTP, SOAP or REST, and via BitTorrent. Amazon plans additional interfaces over time. You can find third party Java libraries as well as libraries for other languages.

S3 was designed to be fast, scalable and simple. It is everything they wanted it to be. While it might seem to be limited in scope, it does provide very scalable and cheap storage for the masses.

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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

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Fortent is a global specialist in anti-money laundering and regulatory compliance. Since 1993 they have served 26 of the world’s 30 largest financial institutions. Fortent’s advanced monitoring and detection technology is endorsed by the American Banking Association and uses a variety of IBM software, hardware and services to deliver the solution including: Tivoli Workload Scheduler, WebSphere Application Server and DB2 Enterprise Database Server, on virtualized IBM System p servers in an IBM e-Business managed hosting facility.

As the financial sector seeks to contain risk and rising compliance costs in the wake of unprecedented industry pressures, Fortent announced that it joined the IBM Software as a Service (SaaS) Specialty to deliver new anti-money laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC) and fraud systems as cloud services to leading large-and mid-sized financial institutions around the world.

“This teaming helps financial organizations achieve two key goals during this turbulent time in the marketplace: lowering their total costs of compliance while managing risk effectively and efficiently,” says Ed Baum, Fortent’s Chief Marketing Officer. The collaboration between the two companies began in 1998, he notes. Today Fortent is one of IBM’s largest financial crimes and compliance technology partners in the world.

This is a huge step for SaaS and IaaS. With Capgemini creating a practice around cloud computing and now with IBM offering it’s cloud infrastructure and consulting expertise, I can see a faster enterprise cloud adoption on the horizon. Mix in a bad economy and lack of captial and the cloud looks like a no-brainer for many applications.

“SaaS is one of the fastest growing segments of the IT industry because it provides companies of all sizes with access to innovative solutions delivered remotely via a subscription model,” said Dave Mitchell, director of strategy, IBM ISV & Developer Relations. “Fortent’s commitment to SaaS can provide its customers with a powerful way to reduce implementation costs while rapidly deploying their compliance solutions.”

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The sign up form is still working, as is the rest of the site. I wonder about their viability though as the latest blog entry is October 16, 2008. The only recent activity I can find in the forums is spam. A forum with uncontrolled spam is usually a sign of the dead pool. To tie it all up, the latest news flash is dated April 2008.

Other than that, the pricing does not look unreasonable. They even offer Windows. Firewalling is an extra cost (which is just kind of weird).

I used the contact form to ask if they are still in business. I guess if I hear from them, I might give the service a try out. I got an automated reply from xcalibre. Not a good sign. Maybe business was so bad that flexiscale got sucked back into xcalibre? I will post an update if I hear anything.

I did do a google search and it looks like flexiscale had some major issues with outages back in the August and October time frames. However, I found an entry as recently as Nov 2008 about rightscale having an interface to Flexiscale. Oh well, I’ll just wait and see what kind of response, if any, I get.

LewisC

Technorati : cloud computing, platform, storage