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 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.

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

As I have been playing around with EC2 one of things that seemed to be missing were bigger instances with more CPU and memory. Amazon describes their base instance as “One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.” and has 1.7GB of RAM. That works really well in most cases, but I was wanting to see something a little bigger for a MySQL database machine . Amazon rolled out some larger instance types just recently that seem to fit the need.

I have been following Amazon’s EC2 system for a couple months now. Been looking for an excuse to try it out. Now that Agent Scoreboard is live I needed to find a new Linux server to develop on and figured this would be the perfect project. If you haven’t heard of EC2 before it is a great concept. You pay for the processing and bandwidth that you need. For instance if you need a server for just a couple hours to test some new software or do some computing you can spin one of for those couple hours and then shut it down when you are finished. No setup charges, just $0.10 an hour per instance plus bandwidth. This is perfect for sites where they may need a couple extra web or database servers running for a couple hours during their peak times. You can choose from a basic Linux install, customize a basic one and store it for later use or upload an image from your own Linux box.