Tech Stuff

Amazon EC2 is now out of Beta after two year and now gets an SLA.

Service Commitments and Service Credits

If the Annual Uptime Percentage for a customer drops below 99.95% for the Service Year, that customer is eligible to receive a Service Credit equal to 10% of their bill for the Eligible Credit Period. To file a claim, a customer does not have to have wait 365 days from the day they started using the service or 365 days from their last successful claim. A customer can file a claim any time their Annual Uptime Percentage over the trailing 365 days drops below 99.95%.

Amazon has announced that later this fall that they will offer the ability to run Windows Server and SQL Server in the EC2 environment.

Amazon announces that they are making another type of EC2 instances available.

These instances have proportionally more CPU resources than RAM (compared to our Standard Instances) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications such as rendering, search indexing, and computational analysis. These new instances include High-CPU Medium and Extra Large Instances – the Extra Large Instance includes 8 virtual cores to meet your computing needs.

The specs look pretty good.

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

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.

Amazon announces the creation of availability zones for the EC2 system. Amazon describes them as “distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other availability zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other availability zones in the same region”. With new web service calls you can choose what zone your instances are created in. In the past when you created a new instance you had no control over where the instance really lived.  Here is part of the email that I received this morning about it:

Availability Zones give you the ability to easily and inexpensively operate a highly available internet application. Each Amazon EC2 Availability Zone is a distinct location that is engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Previously, only very large companies had the scale to be able to distribute an application across multiple locations, but now it is as easy as changing a parameter in an API call. You can choose to run your application across multiple Availability Zones to be prepared for unexpected events such as power failures or network connectivity issues, or you can place instances in the same Availability Zone to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.

One of the problems with Amazon EC2 was the dynamic nature of the IP address that you received for each instance you started up.  For development it isn’t a big problem, but for a production system you can see the problems this can cause if you instance fails for some reason.  This morning Amazon announced the ability to have a static IP that is associated with your AWS account.  By default a user can have up to 5 static IP addresses.  The IP addresses are free of charge as long as the IP address is associated with a running instance.  If the IP isn’t then there is a charge of $.01/hr.  You can read more about this on the Amazon Web Services Developer site.

I came across an interesting article on the New York Times site that talks about how they used Amazon EC2 and S3 to help make their articles from 1851 -1922 available to the public online.  There was a total of 11 million articles.  They had to take sometimes several TIFF images and scale and glue them together to create one PDF version of the article.  They used 100 EC2 instances to complete the job in just under 24 hours.  They started with 4TB of data that was uploaded into S3 and through the conversion process created another 1.5TB.

In an articles on Forbes.com, “The Death of Hardware”, they discuss Zillow and their recent use of Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform to recalculate the values of some 67 million homes for their site.  Zillow estimated the task would take 6 months and millions of dollars before they went with the EC2 platform which was about $50,000, roughly 3 weeks and used 500 servers.

In the article Forbes also mentions that Microsoft is expected to roll out their own form of the computing cloud (Windows Live Core) this month which is aimed at large businesses. Yahoo is expected to release theirs later this year. With the talk about Microsoft purchasing Yahoo we will have to see if the cloud happens for Yahoo. I hope Yahoo does as I would think their platform would be linux based and that is what I am looking for. Would be nice to see more competition in the space which would help drive more advancements and hopefully even lower prices.

Right now we are just running the Agent Scoreboard development box on EC2. Eventually I want to move our production system to the platform for the scalability that it offers. The main problem I have come up against was email delivery from the system. Emails sent to a gmail.com account and a couple others were delivered successfully, but had issues sending to yahoo, hotmail and various other servers. Once I sat back and thought about this it made perfect sense. I can not set a reverse DNS entry for the IP the server is running on. This is getting my messages flagged as possible spam or getting rejected totally. Looking around found a couple sites that with act as an SMTP server for us for a reasonable price. Here are some that I found: authsmtp.com, dnsmadeeasy.com, easydns.com

Since the EC2 platform is administered via web services some people have come out with some handy tools to make it easier. If you are running Firefox this one is a must have. Sure beats the dos based tools that I started using. This tool is useful even if all you do is start it up to make sure you don’t have any instances still running that you didn’t know about which would be racking up a bill.

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=609