Cloud Computing Info

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Amazon announced a nice new feature for S3. You can now let Amazon charge a third party for the storage they use on your account. The nice thing about this is that if you offer a storage service (say images or documents), you can provide your service and let Amazon bill them directly.

Bits For Sale – The New Amazon S3 Requester Pays Model

If you read the AWS blog entry, you’ll see that you can use this new feature in two ways: a special, signed request or via devpay.

People frequently ask me about cloud examples and success stories. Of course, the biggest success story has to be Animoto on RightScale.

On April 14, 2008, Animoto launched a Facebook plugin for their Rails application where users create music videos with photos and music of their choice. Its instant popularity forced them to scale up the number of application and worker servers at an unprecendented rate in just a few days. They were also able to easily scale down their deployment after the initial traffic spike was over.

Here is the presentation I did live at SOUG in November and that I am doing a webinar on today.

An overview of cloud computing using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Also provides info on the business value of running in the cloud, what Oracle Corp provides for running in the cloud and a walk through of starting an EC2 instance and attaching an EBS volume.

Cloud Computing Using Oracle and Amazon Web Services