Amazon Web Services

Over the past few months we have been speaking to several people about how we may build some awareness of Linux, open source software and cloud computing (specifically AWS).

We have been playing with a few ideas, namely:

1. A version of GoOpen for the North East
2. A FOSSCamp event on the theme of the very popular BarCamp concept
3. A ‘hackathon’ or ‘mashup’ type event

Some of us are meeting up for a sandwich at 13:00 on Thursday 26th June at Panis cafe in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

I hope that we can get a few interested people together to throw around a few ideas. The whole concept is in a very early stage so we would like to invite ANY interesed parties to attend.

If you cant attend please feel free to add your comments to this blog entry and I will raise your comments at the meeting.

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AWS announced the release of two new instance types last month…there are now five:

Small Instance (default)*
1.7 GB memory
1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
160 GB instance storage (150 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
Price: $0.10 per instance hour

Large Instance
7.5 GB memory
4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB instance storage (2 x 420 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
Price: $0.40 per instance hour

Extra Large Instance
15 GB memory 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
1,690 GB instance storage (4 x 420 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
Price: $0.80 per instance hour

High-CPU Medium Instance
1.7 GB of memory
5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
350 GB of instance storage
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
Price: $0.20 per instance hour

High-CPU Extra Large Instance
7 GB of memory
20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
Price: $0.80 per instance hour

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In preparation for tonights meetings I have uploaded a copy of my Scalr presentation. Please feel free to download a copy:

Scalr Presentation (Powerpoint 2007)

Scalr Presentation (Powerpoint 2003)

Scalr Presentation (Zip file containing PNG files of each slide)

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The next user group meeting is planned for Thursday April 24th @ 5:45. As usual the meeting will take place in the Rozmic Wireless offices in Gateshead International Business Center. There is a map here:
http://www.rozmic.com/gateshead.html

This event is sponsored by Codeworks Connect.

The following speakers are lined up:
Steve Caughey from Arjuna Technologies
Steve will talk about how Arjuna are using grid and utility computing (including AWS EC2) to deliver services to their clients.
Jonathan Bradford
Jon is a regular at the user group meetings and is a keen follower of the cloud and utility computing areas. He will speak for about 15 minutes about how he sees the market progressing and some of the startups that he is following.
Ross Cooney from Rozmic
Ross will give a brief presentation on Scalr. Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon’s EC2.

It would help if everybody on the list was to spread the word! Please confirm your attendance so that food can be ordered.

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At Tuesdays meeting I gave a presentation which covers the SimpleDB service from Amazon.

The presentation gave a brief introduction to the CAP theorm from Eric Brewer and how SimpleDB fits in to it.

This presentation was written by Sebastian Stadil from the AWSome user group on Silicon Valley. The presentation is licenced under the GNU Free Documentation License .

Amazon SimpleDB Presentation

1 Comment » Posted by admin / Uncategorized

Our next meeting has been arranged for Tuesday 11th March @ 5:45. As usual the event will take place at the Rozmic offices in Gateshead.

The evening will follow this format:

1. Introduction: a ten minute re-cap on our last meeting. This will act as an introduction of what AWS is and how it may be used.
2. Presentation: Tony Lucas from XCALIBRE has agreed to travel down from Livingston in Scotland to speak at the event. Tony has 11 years experience in the hosting industry, and started building a Cloud Computing platform before most of us even knew of it. Tony will speak about his experience with Cloud Computing including the business benefits of and the downfalls. This will be an engaging talk which will cover resource management, implementation, portability/vendor lock in and dealing with scalability and growth.
3. Technical: Simple ways to use S3 in your web applications (regardless if you use EC2 to host your application).

We are looking forward to a large turn-out so please confirm your attendance by email.

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Tuesdays meeting was excellent. It was great to see that we had a representation from people with both technical and management interests in AWS. It was also great to welcome Carri Cunliffe and Claire Haydock from Codeworks Connect.

The running order of the night was:

1. Introduction: a ten minute re-cap on our last meeting. This acted as an introduction of what AWS is and how it may be used. DOWNLOAD PRESENTATION.
2. Technical: a twenty minute presentation on how you can setup an AWS account and get your first EC2 instance up and running. VIEW PRESENTATION.
3. User Presentation: a ten minute presentation from Adrian Teesdale from Inovica. Adrian uses AWS extensively and showed us how he is using AWS to increase his infrastructure capability while also lowering his monthly costs. DOWNLOAD PRESENTATION.
4. Technical: a second technical presentation which explained how to make custom changes to your EC2 instance. VIEW PRESENTATION.

Thank you to everybody who attended. I look forward to seeing you at the next event.

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In preparation for tonights meeting I have uploaded a video of two of our presentations. These are rather technical presentations so I recorded a video of them so that you can watch as often as you like.

Presentation 1:

I show you how to setup your AWS account, setup your PC and then launch your first EC2 instance:

Presentation 2:

I show you how to make changes to your instance, save it and then create a custom EC2 image:

I hope these are of use!

1 Comment » Posted by rosscooney / Uncategorized

The second meeting of the Newcastle-Gateshead Amazon Web Services user group will take place on Tuesday 29th January at 5:30.

The event will be held at the Rozmic offices in Gateshead International Business Centre, NE8 1AN).

The running order is:

1) Introduction: a ten minute re-cap on our last meeting. This will act as an introduction of what AWS is and how it may be used.

2) Technical: a twenty minute presentation on how you can setup an AWS account and get your first EC2 instance up and running.

3) User Presentation: a ten minute presentation from a company who use AWS in their business. The presentation will cover why they selected AWS and how it is helping them to bring their services to market.

4) Technical: a second technical presentation which will show you how to make custom changes to your EC2 instance.

Please confirm your attendance by sending an email to Ross Cooney (ross at rozmic dot com).

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Amazon SimpleDB will be made available as a limited beta sometime in the next few weeks.

Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.  Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity.

More here….

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