Amazon Web Services

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

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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.

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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

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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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