All about AWS

September 1, 2008

Recently I spent some time trying to understand AWS at the next level of detail.  I found some interesting stuff out there.   Here is a brief overview of AWS.

Infrastructure Services

  • S3 – Simple Storage System.  Web-based storage.
  • EC2 – Elastic Compute Cloud – On-demand processing power.
  • SQS – Simple Queue Service – Messaging service for transferring work between computers.
  • SimpleDB – Database version of S3.

Payment & Billing Services

  • FPS – Flexible Payment System – System for accepting payments
  • DevPay – Tool for developers to be paid for AWS applications

On-Demand Workforce

  • Mechanical Turk – Ability to farm out units of work to humans.

Amazon also operates four Alexa services (web search, web information search, top sites, and site thumnail).  These services are tied to the Alexa web search engine.  Finally, Amazon operates two other web services fulfillment web service and associates web service.  Both of these services are e-commerce services related to the Amazon store.

There don’t seem to be many books on the subjet.  The best looking book is “Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB” by James Murty the author of JetS3t.  A number of the reviews say that its a “Ruby” book.  Another interesting book is “Amazaon.com Mashups” from Francis Shanahan.  Both books were written some time ago while Amazon keeps upgrading their services.

There are a couple of seemingly good examples of how to program AWS on the Amazon site.

Sample application to get started with Amazon SQS and Amazon EC2 – http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1457&categoryID=85. The client examples in C#, server examples are in Java.

Browser Uploads to S3 using HTML POST Forms - http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1434.  The examples are in Ruby, Python, or Java.

JetS3t is a free, open-source Java toolkit and application suite for S3.  The JetS3t toolkit provides Java programmers with a powerful yet simple API for interacting with S3 and managing data stored there.  (Description lifted from the web site.)

To use AWS you need to be prepared to pay for everything you do.  Its not clear to me why this not free to developers like Salesforce.com developer accounts and Google’s AppEngine.

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Posted by scooter998

Saleforce.com Winter ’09

August 29, 2008

Salesforce recently published the list of the Winter ’09 enhancements. You can find the full list here http://ideas.salesforce.com/popular/coming_in_winter_09.  Some of the more interesting items include:

•    Scheduled emailing of emails and dashboards
•    Ability to package Visualforce
•    Exception queries
•    Case Teams
•    Allow for Account Search during lead conversion
•    Allow workflow from case comments

Salesforce has not published a schedule for Winter ’09 but based on past history the production release happens shortly after the sandbox upgrade window which is scheduled for
scheduled for 12:01 AM PST September 16th, 2008, through October 11th, 2008.  http://blogs.salesforce.com/blogs/2008/08/the-salesforcec.html

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Posted by scooter998

AT&T and Cloud Computing – Sorta

August 25, 2008

A colleague of mine recently sent me an article from the Washington Post about AT&T getting into cloud computing. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/05/AR2008080501574.html. The this article clubs AT&T (and eventually Verizon) into the same space as Google or Amazon. In my view this is not the right way to think about it. AT&T and Verizon are heading into the space occupied by OpSource, Rackspace (Mosso), 3Tera, Joyent. This is certainly a good this type of solution for clients that want to deploy a solution that will grow with them or need flexible infrastructure to seamlessly accommodate spikes in traffic (e.g., Superbowl commercial, Olympics, etc.).

I view what Amazon (AWS), Google (AppEngine, Gadgets), IBM (Blue Cloud), and Salesforce.com (Platform as a Service) are doing as being very different. Indeed these organizations are offering a platform on which an organization can deploy their application. I’ve seen this referred to as utility computing. The key difference in my mind is that you are running application code on the provider’s grid vs. having a scalable hosting infrastructure. The lines are fuzzy between on-demand computing and what I am referring to as utility computing as some of the on-demand computing players are offering services of their own (i.e., OpSource Billing). One way to think about it is that in on-demand computing a developer needs to be aware of the underlying operating system where in utility computing they do not.

Each partner offers different services. For example, Amazon S3 (part of AWS) is a great solution for an on-line backup application like Jungle Disk. IBM Blue Cloud appears to be meant for scientific research that requires mainframe computing resources. No doubt by design Salesforce.com has carved out a spot for themselves right in the middle of the pack and appears to be applicable for many general purpose applications.

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Posted by scooter998

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