Tech Stuff

Today Google announced they have opened up Google Apps so that anyone can signup.  They also released the planned pricing for people who exceed the free quota.  However, they are not yet offering the ability for developers to purchase additional resources.

$0.10 – $0.12 per CPU core-hour

$0.15 – $0.18 per GB-month of storage

$0.11 – $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth

$0.09 – $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

I am curious how the CPU core-hour is going to be defined.  Will it be like Amazon where it is the time you instance is running whether or not your instance is actually processing anything.  Or will they just charge for the cpu used while processing requests to your application.

Google also announced that a new image manipulation API is available.  This is the same infrastructure that is used for the Picasa Web Albums.  The other new one is the Memcache API which is a high performance caching layer.

I received my invite to use the Google App Engine last night. Time to learn some Python now as they don’t currently support PHP.

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.

Over the last couple of weeks I have started having some problems with spam showing up on various pages where I allow the a visitor to post comments. The message is always the same across all the pages. To help prevent this type of spam the visitor must register with the site and have their email address validated by clicking an activate link in an email sent to them. In the registration form there is also a Captcha. Not sure why they are choosing to spam this site as I remove any html from the comments. The IP the requests originate from were are all in Africa. My quick solution is that I am blocking traffic from in the offending IP ranges. This is only a temporary solution as eventually I figure I will start having problems with IPs originating in the US.

The other day I started searching Google for possible solutions. One option was to find a Captcha library that was more difficult to crack than the one I am currently using. In the search I came across a list of the Top 10 Worst Captchas. These are were all a little extreme, but would definitely do the job. I doubt I would get any comments with some of these.

After searching for a while I settled on reCaptcha which is a project at Carnegie Mellon University. They have libraries for the popular web languages and some plugins for applications. One of them is for WordPress which I installed earlier today. A quick blurb about reCaptcha project:

Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.

I’ll let you know if I have any issues with the PHP version. From the documentation it is pretty straight forward and I don’t have to deal with the image libraries anymore like I had to with my previous Captcha library.

Today VeriSign announced that it is raising the wholesale cost of .com domains from $6.42 to $6.86 a year and .net from $3.85 to $4.23.  This change is effective 10-1-2008.  This will most likely case the discount domain registrars to raise their prices roughly the same.   The cost is said to help with the costs associated with maintaining the main DNS servers.  In the announcement it mentions that “VeriSign processes a peak of more than 33 billion DNS queries per day under normal traffic conditions”.

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.

Several months ago I finally got a second monitor. After a couple days I don’t know how I ever did it with just one. I believe I have become much more productive especially as I usually have remote desktop open on one of them. If you need some proof that it can help your productivity to help convince your boss to get you a second or even a 3rd monitor I came across the a blog entry by Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror. In the post he references a study at the University of Utah.

Researchers at the University of Utah tested how quickly people performed tasks like editing a document and copying numbers between spreadsheets while using three different computer configurations:

1. single 18-inch monitor
2. single 24-inch monitor
3. two 20-inch monitors

Here’s what they found:

• People using the 24-inch screen completed the tasks 52% faster than people who used the 18-inch monitor
• People who used the two 20-inch monitors were 44% faster than those with the 18-inch ones.
• Productivity dropped off again when people used a 26-inch screen.