Amazon Web Services

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

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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!

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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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I have created a Google Group to help aid communication between the user group.

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/aws-user-group

Please feel free to signup and contribute!

Ross

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Thanks to all of the brave souls who made it out last night to our first AWS user group meting. I really believe that Amazon has launched a fabulous range of services and it is great to see so many people in agreement. I am sorry if anybody missed the football match!

I hope that this turns into a regular (monthly or bi-monthly) session where people can exchange their experiences, successes and perhaps frustrations with the AWS range of services.

My particular interest in AWS extends further than the technical competence of the services or indeed their reliability. I see the combination of AWS tools allowing startup companies to scale incredibly fast with very low funds and jump the “second round investment” stage. I hope that through my talk I planted some seeds in your mind on how you can use some of the AWS services to build a business from an idea to a commercial reality with a very low cost base.

I have uploaded my presentation in Powerpoint 2003 and 2007 format:

http://www.awsug.com/download/AWSug_Nov_21.ppt

or

http://www.awsug.com/download/AWSug_Nov_21.pptx

The next meeting is scheduled for 29^th January. Please put this in your diary, I will conform in early January. What do you suggest that we discuss? There are a few options:

1)    Last night’s meeting wasn’t very technical. We could run a technical meeting? Perhaps running through a tutorial to get setup on the service, startup an EC2 instance and then save some data in S3?

2)    We could invite a heavy AWS user to attend and ask them to run a presentation on their experiences?

3)    We could ask an investor to tell us what excites them about AWS?

4)    We could do all of the above?

Please feel free to send me your comments. What did you think of the format or content of last nights meeting? I have setup a mailing list on Google Groups. We can use this to communicate between each other and pass tips, tricks or other snippets of information. You can subscribe to this group here:

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/aws-user-group?hl=en-GB

Once again, thanks to everybody who attended last night and I hope to see you at the next meeting,

Ross Cooney

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The first meeting will take place in the board room of the Rozmic Wireless offices in Gateshead on Wednesday 21st November at 5:30pm.

This will be an event for business people and technical people…both sides are welcome !!! It will not be an overly technical event.

During the first event I will present a case study around the advantages and shortfalls in the system…basically asking the question:
Should I build my web infrastructure in a traditional Co-Lo facility or on the AWS platform?

The case study will cover everything from the business case for AWS along with the technical problems……seriously….it will not be too technical.

If you are interested in attending please email me (ross at rozmic dot com) so I can add you to the list!

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