Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
IBM WebSphere
Virtualize apps
to lower costs,
Increase agility
Learn more!
QCon San Francisco
Nov 19-21:
+ 80 sessions & tracks
Register now
and Save $400!
Create REST
-enabled Web Apps
with Project Zero
from IBM.
Terracotta:
Scale your
Apps w/ease
Offload the DB:
Learn More!
Posted by Scott Delap on Sep 05, 2006 01:43 PM
Amazon has quietly been expanding their business as of late. These newest additions are not stores targeted at consumers. Instead Amazon is targeting developers with a trio of services:
Pricing is based on the time/data that you use.
Data transfer between EC2 servers or Amazon S3 is free.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Features:
Pricing is based on the data stored/transfered.
Amazon Simple Queue Serve (SQS)
Amazon SQS offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed application components performing different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. Amazon SQS works by exposing Amazon's web-scale messaging infrastructure as a web service. Any computer on the Internet can add or read messages without any installed software or special firewall configurations.
Again pricing is based only on usage.
Questions about privacy concerns and compliance with laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley have been raised about the services. This has not stopped a number of tutorials from being created detailing getting an EC2 server instance up and running with applications written in languages such as Python and Ruby on Rails.
Given the variety of features and pricing numbers it can be hard to grasp what can be done using Amazon's services. A few quick calculations reveal:
...Can you imagine being able to provision 1, 2 or 500 additional servers in minutes for your application programmatically?...And so if Digg, Techmeme, Reddit or TechCrunch or the meme of your choice is sending you millions of hits, add a few virtual servers to support your application and then scale back as traffic dissipates.
...Capacity planning and operations management are things that are often ignored at startup companies. When all of a sudden traffic spikes and you're unable to scale until the new servers arrive next week you're screwed. But the ability to add additional capacity in minutes is an enormous leveling force. Also, the ability to scale up and down is just as important. You can greatly reduce your operational costs by not paying for the compute power until you need it.
An example of Amazon's services changing how applications are written is the Openfount Queued Server. The Ajax/GWT client application is served via Amazon's S3. S3 then serves as a queue providing communication between the client and one or many servers handling the processing of requests.
Ensuring SOA success with effective, automated control throughout the lifecycle
Hacking 101 -The Top 10 Attacks in Web Applications
Efffective Design, DSLs in Practice, DDD, Cloud Computing and more tracks @ QCon SF Nov 19-21
IBM software architect eKit: Grady Booch podcast, whitepapers, articles
Introducing Project Zero: Building RESTful services for your Web application
This is very compelling. It could transform the webhosting industry - it would cost < $250/month to host your typical 2 server clustered app + one DB machine and < 50 gigs a month transfer. I think the biggest change could result in making it really easy for software writers to also get into the ASP business. Today software vendors aren't typically also offering hosting solutions as that's a very different business model. But if Amazon can make it super easy for them to do that, perhaps in 3 years it will be come the norm to buy an already hosted server instance for any piece of software you might want, instead of downloading the app itself and installing it within your own datacenter. First open source dramatically reduces the cost of software licences for softare projects, now large scale virtualized hosting dramatically reduces the cost of hardware/datacenter...
I agree - this is very very compelling. I am contemplating switching one of my applications to it. One of my questions is whats the best way to do database stuff (SQL? someothing else?)on top of these apis? There is no permanent filesystem which I could point an sql server too, which makes it difficult.
I could be wrong but my understanding is that you get root access to a virtual linux instance on which you can install anything you want and it should have access to its own local virtual hard drive.
The hard drive is erased once the instance is gone though AFAIK. And its only 160MB of space.
This is good, but from a developers perspective, it is still not affordable. Atleast I cannot afford a $250 a month server. From a small business perspective, this might be a viable option, but i think there should be cheaper options out there for dedicated hosting, maybe they dont give root access to the machine, but again, from a developers perspective, if i had to choose, i would definitely forego root access than paying $250 per month.
Most companies are paying $2500/month and up for a 4 name brand servers at a quality ISP with load balancing, redundancy, etc. $250 is not bad. :) But hard drive space appears to be a problem.
I think the answer to the question, 'Will Amazon Change How Enterprise Applications are Written and Hosted?' is a resounding YES. I was just thinking about something we do at work where month-end processing takes tons of resources and CPU cycles for maybe 24 hrs straight - What if you could use 1000 virtual instances to multi-task this process and scale horizontally? And if you could get your work done in an hour, it would only cost you $10.00.. Can you imagine that? Instead of getting clusters of servers or big 64 processor boxes, you can leverage EC2. I think this is going to be a compelling offering as long as Amazon is really behind it and continues to support it. SOX, while an issue is not going to be a real issue as long as Amazon really wants to get into the Enterprise market. Being a public company, Amazon already has most of the SOX controls in place and can implement appropriate separation in terms of data, encryption to pass any audit. In fact, they would bring in Price Waterhouse Coopers or some auditing firm like that and get a SOX certification like a SAS 70 certification. --Vinny http://www.j2eegeek.com/blog/
It's written 160 GB on the article above, no MB... It makes quite a difference isn't it ? lol
As a theoratical concept, ec2 sounds compelling. Does anyone know if amazon provides SLA? Their compute grid is limited by the number of machines. In an environment, where increase in compute capacity is as simple as making a webservice,i am wondering how do they characterize the workload of their grid. This becomes particularly tricky when machines are shared. One simple way is to go dedicated hosting and reserve the machine or machines for x amount of hours. If end user requires more computing power, a webservice call can be made and at that time, based on machine reservation, amazon can provide or deny extra computing... In this case this is not really on demand computing.
From Amazon's EC2 docs regarding the storage limitations:
Do not rely on an instance's local storage for valuable, long-term data . Instances can fail, and when they fail, the data on the local disk is lost. You should use a replication strategy across multiple instances to keep your data safe or store your persistent data in Amazon S3.
From my perspective, this means is that you actually have an unlimited amount of space available when you use EC2 and the S3 services together.
Thin client paradigm characterized by web applications is a kludge that needs to be repudiated. Old compromises are no longer needed and it's time to move the presentation tier to where it belongs.
In this presentation filmed during QCon 2007, Jeff Sutherland, the creator of Scrum, talks about his visit at Google to do an analysis of Google's first implementation of Scrum.
In this article, Bryon Jacob and Chris Berry introduce AtomServer, their implementation of a full-fledged Atom Store based on Apache Abdera, which is now available as open source.
It is easy to think that virtualization applies only to servers. In reality the recent resurgence of the concept is also being applied to networking, storage, and application infrastructure.
In this article, Stefan Tilkov explains some of the most common anti-patterns found in applications that claim to follow a "RESTful" design and suggests ways to avoid them.
In this article, Adrien Louis and Marc Dutoo discuss the differences and relative merits of using orchestration vs. routing in a typical ESB setup, and discuss various implementation options.
Wayne Lund discusses batch processing, Spring Batch objectives and features, scenarios for usage, Spring Batch architecture, scaling, example code, failures and retrying, and the future roadmap.
Developer Jay Fields draws on his experiences as a ThoughtWorks consultant to describe effective user story estimation techniques.
10 comments
Reply