Tech Stuff

Today Amazon announced that they will start offering premium support options for their web services.

AWS Customers who sign up for AWS Premium Support will receive personalized technical assistance from the Amazon Web Services team, whenever and as frequently as their business demands. The service offers support for operational issues or technical questions during development, test or integration. Customers can contact AWS developer support engineers and count on fast, predictable response times and personalized support to help bring their issues to resolution. AWS Premium Support is currently available to customers of the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).

The pricing seems reasonable for the services especially since you an open an unlimited number of cases.

Amazon announces that they will have support for persistent storage in an upcoming release. Right now it is being used privately by a handful of EC2 users.

This new feature provides reliable, persistent storage volumes, for use with Amazon EC2 instances. These volumes exist independently from any Amazon EC2 instances, and will behave like raw, unformatted hard drives or block devices, which may then be formatted and configured based on the needs of your application. The volumes will be significantly more durable than the local disks within an Amazon EC2 instance. Additionally, our persistent storage feature will enable you to automatically create snapshots of your volumes and back them up to Amazon S3 for even greater reliability.

You will be able to create volumes ranging in size from 1 GB to 1 TB, and will be able to attach multiple volumes to a single instance. Volumes are designed for high throughput, low latency access from Amazon EC2, and can be attached to any running EC2 instance where they will show up as a device inside of the instance. This feature will make it even easier to run everything from relational databases to distributed file systems to Hadoop processing clusters using Amazon EC2.

This is an exciting announcement and soon there will be no reasons why you wouldn’t use EC2 for a production system.  The other big thing was the dynamic IP addresses, but that was addressed a couple weeks ago with the Elastic IP Addresses.

Google launches the preview release of their cloud computing environment to compete against Amazon EC2/S3 called the Google App Engine. It was limited to the first 10,000 developers that signed up and of course I didn’t make it.

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following features:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

One of the parts I find interesting is that Google plans on having a free version of the service that has a pretty good allotment of resources:

During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.