Amazon Web Services

"High Performance Computing Clusters with the Amazon Cloud" 
 

Synopsis:

At his third appointment with the Amazon Web Services User Group in London, Nicola Cardace is committed to sustain with additional curiosity and momentum the highly skilled and participative crowd of experts, academics and geeks in London. He will cover a few cutting edge approaches for High Performance Computing clustering and how it can all be deployed in very short time following the on-demand paradigm of Amazon Web Services Elastic Computing Cloud. These (open-source) tools are available worldwide across the scientific and research community and are already successfully used by a number of visionary academic and commercial projects.

Instead of building your own supercomputer at home, this time you will get an inspiration on how to build one from home, instead.

The presentation is designed to encourage your participation together with an open and relaxed discussion.

No Comments » Posted by cpurrington / Uncategorized

At last nights meet up (hosted by SkillsMatter) Nicola Cardace gave an overview of

Auto-Scaling Using Amazon EC2 and Scalr

Nginx and Memcached on EC2,a 400% boost!

NASDAQ exchange re-play on AWS

Persistent Django on Amazon EC2

and covered

EBSTaking Massive Distributed Computing to the Common Man – Hadoop on Amazon EC2/S3, in a little more detail

Nick’s slides included a lot of useful links, the slides can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/cpurrington/aws-hadoop-meetup-300409

We did not have time to cover CohesiveFT’s cloud onboarding solutions; the ElasticServer software factory and Overlay Network solution VPN-Cubed. Hopefully we’ll cover them next time, in the mean time the slides are posted at http://www.slideshare.net/cpurrington/onboarding-for-public-private-and-hybrid-clouds-aws-300409

No Comments » Posted by cpurrington / Uncategorized

Amazon Web Services is coming to London! You are invited to attend this exclusive half-day event on April 28 which will show business and technology leaders how to be successful with AWS. This event will show you how to get started with AWS and how to architect your applications for the cloud. Also, hear how companies of all sizes, from all industries are using services, such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, to power everything from their websites to workflows.

Reasons to attend:

• Learn why and how to integrate AWS cloud computing solutions into your business
• Hear from existing customers about their uses of and experiences with AWS
• Network with AWS representatives and local tech leaders

Event Details:

April 28, 2009, British Museum, London, UK

• 13:00-17:00: Presentations from AWS and local tech leaders
• 17:00-19:00: Networking/Cocktail Reception

Seats are limited, register today.

No Comments » Posted by admin / Uncategorized

We are looking to run regular London AWS UG meetings once a month. Hot on the heels of the successful AWS UG London meeting on 4th February and CloudCamp London last week, the AWS London community is coming together again.

Our next two meetings 31st March and 30th April will be jargon free events to educate, entertain and fascinate geeks and non-geeks about the “silent revolution” of using web, computing, storage, databases, and payment processing services in the same way as we today perceive electricity: an utility, on-demand service. This is real and it is happening today, everywhere.

This is the time where smart players will have the same opportunities as well established entities and the infrastructural barriers to the service economy are disappearing. Large enterprises are redefining their infrastructure investment and their total cost of ownership, while agile start-ups – without no upfront investment – instantly tapping into resources that a few years ago would only have dreamt of.

Nicola Cardace will present a journey though the resources that are available to AWS users, the current paradigm shift in the mind of large enterprise architects in the City and will also project yourself straight into the brain of the technology gurus of a few buzzing start-ups in the current European scene, how they are tackling scalability and control.

The talk will end with an interactive session to give you the opportunity to share your experience.

Please come along, CohesiveFT will buy you a beer in the Crown on the Green afterwards. Let your friends, colleagues, boss, anyone who wants to know more about the Cloud know about the meetup.

Sign up at

31st March 2009 http://skillsmatter.com/event/cloud-grid/amazon-an-intro-to-cloud-computing

30th April 2009 http://skillsmatter.com/event/cloud-grid/amazon-web-services-meetup-323

No Comments » Posted by cpurrington / Uncategorized

I just gave a presentation to the North East Chapter of SOCITM (Society of Information Technology Management) in St James’s Park, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. SOCITM is the professional association for public sector ICT managers.

In the presentation I gave an introduction the Cloud Computing (SaaS, PaaS & IaaS) and how the technology is different to the doomed ASP model of the Dot Bomb days.

The main point of my talk was that while Cloud Computing opens up several security and compliance problems (if you use sensitive data in a shared environment) it is perfectly safe to use for rather inoculous data that is not ’sensitive’. While you would be silly to use a SaaS provider to host your Child Protection Register, it would be perfectly fine to host your Christmas website or to host a large file that you want to make available to many users.

We also touched upon the advantages of using IaaS providers to rent hardware on short term projects or for development. The main goal is to lower investment costs, increase speed to market and provide a better service to your userbase. In my view, the main advantages of the technology are: 

• Pay per use
• Instant Scalability
• Reliability
• APIs

You can download my presentation here:

• Cloud Computing introduction (Powerpoint 2007)
• Cloud Computing introduction (Powerpoint 2003)

No Comments » Posted by admin / Uncategorized

Amazon have announced the release of CloudFront, their new cloud based service which delivers your content using a global network of edge locations. With the release of CloudFront, Amazon’s ever-increasing cloud computing service portfolio has increased to include content delivery. This is a new service that caches high-traffic content on the Amazon worldwide network of servers. The basic concept is that the content is served from the closest server on the edge of the Amazon network…leading to fast delivery and low latency.

While this is not a new market and it is already dominated my large and established brands, it has traditionally been an expensive market. Amazon has built a pay-as-you-go service which is very cheap and easy to use. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) which durably stores the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services, there are no contracts or monthly commitments for using Amazon CloudFront – you pay only for as much or as little content as you actually deliver through the service. They have 14 edge locations around the world. These are:

US:

• Ashburn, Virginia
• Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas
• Los Angeles, California
• Miami, Florida
• Newark, New Jersey
• Palo Alto, California
• Seattle, Washington
• St. Louis, Missouri

Europe

• Amsterdam
• Dublin
• Frankfurt
• London

Asia

• Hong Kong
• Tokyo

You can find more information here
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront

1 Comment » Posted by admin / Uncategorized

Last month the AWSUG presented at the Codeworks Connect ‘Think and A Drink’ event in the Northern Stage, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The event was sponsored by Amazon Web Services and Rozmic and was attended by 120 people.

In a packed theatre developers, techies and commercial minds alike argued the merits of hosted services and investment in new technology at a time of global credit crunching. The event kicked off with a short presentation by Ross Cooney who gave s short introduction to cloud computing, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.

The program progressed to a panel discussion, chaired by Andrew Robson. The panel comprised of Ross Cooney (AWSUG and emailcloud, Tony Lucas (Flexiscale.net), Steve Caughey (Arjuna), Sarat Pediredla (Hedgehog Labs) and Duncan Mactear (4Projects).

The optimistic view, taken by the majority of the panel, was that we are on a journey towards cloud computing becoming the norm for business computing. Duncan Mactear of 4Projects sounded a more cautious note; his company provides SaaS for the construction industry but does not use cloud; instead their servers are hosted in a third-party data centre. To which Tony Lucas of Flexiscale pointed out that 10 years ago, similar companies weren’t even using hosting services.

Trust was raised as a key issue. Several panellists opined that interoperability was the best answer to this; then if your provider has problems, you can switch your application to another. Rozmic run their EmailCloud application on both Amazon and Flexiscale, switching between them when one has problems. The downside of this is that it is currently expensive to implement applications for multiple providers, although some companies (such as CohesiveFT and Rightscale) are providing systems to aid this process.

Excellent networking oppertunity

An air of real change was felt by the participating audience. “This will revolutionise the way we do business”, said Maxeen Turton, of Codeworks Connect, “Cloud Computing doesn’t just increase our capability to take on new business- it greatly increases our effectiveness in day to day use of our own server capacity.” By adopting cloud computing technology within their own organisational server structure, businesses discovered that they greatly improved server capacity in all areas, whilst saving power and money. Others discovered how SaaS can provide them with the same services normally affordable to large organisations, for a fraction of the cost.

The event was excellently organised by Maxeen Turton from Codeworks. This blog post was written with the help of Dave Berry.

No Comments » Posted by admin / Uncategorized

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

2 Comments » Posted by admin / Uncategorized

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)

No Comments » Posted by admin / Uncategorized

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.

2 Comments » Posted by admin / Uncategorized