Racks and Pipes for Pennies
After Etel I have been taking a short break from the normal routine and doing some fact-finding about Cloud computing. I have a nagging voice that says this is a good tech for entrepreneurs. The ability to buy at will computing capacity is extremely enabling and I am sure it will enable a new generation of start ups that previously had some infrastructure barrier (including its maintenance) to solve before they could get started.
An interesting start-up that I came across recently, that uses Amazon's EC2 + S3 platform is Gumiyo. ( I just also found out they presented at Etech) They enable you to use your camera phone to photograph an object and then create a short classified advertisement around it. You send that little bundle to them and they then will post it on your behalf to a number of different classified ads destinations like Google Base/Froogle, Oodle, Edgeio, Vast.com, propsmart and many others. They also provide a double-blind click to call facility so that people reading the advert can connect back to you on your cameraphone but wont be able to subsequently stalk you. Very nicely done and already they are partnering with people like Jajah and other telecoms providers. My my only concern is what's their cost structure might eventually be (it seems pricey to me), but their uptake figures in their 5 months of existence seem to suggest I am wrong about that and some people perceive value for their buck.
The service needs a fair amount of infrastructure and still the company is a small gang of people working from a small office so they don't have the luxury of VC fueled cash liquidity. They are running lean and Shuki Lehavi the founder summed up for me " I have in my previous career built out data centers and I can say that I have one of the best data centers in the world available to me. I even have extra capacity on hand when I need it. The best part is that it cost me less than my car payment each month and the cash that I could have tied up in servers and the hardware, is instead used to improve the customer experience instead. I spend it on what matters most at the moment."
I think Shuki's case is a simple one and I am also looking at how people like Rpath are partnering with Amazon EC2. I think we will see more creative uses of it as people understand more what it is good at doing and what it is not good for doing. If you have any pointers to good uses of EC2 / S3 / Utility computing or know of any good startups powered by this tech please let others know by posting below.
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[04.04.07 01:24 PM]
Can you elaborate further your choices and why you went with AWS? What were your pro's and cons?
[04.04.07 01:54 PM]
Surj,
There are many pros aside from mere cost - as good a reason as that is all on its own!
For me in random order are:
- Scaling. It is so easy to start with one machine and tack on machines as you need them to keep up with demand. There's also a possibility that it may be easier to throw more resources at a website than nit pick code. I'm not sure of that one yet, but thought I'd log it.
EC2 + S3 = your mini datacenter... the iDataCenter. Should you be successful you don't need to relocate, but to merely grow into your datacenter.
Availability. A startup has one or two machines, or 'instances' in this case, and their website availability is second to no one.
S3 = Raid. Even with one machine.
Computing power at the push of a button - soon to be as detected in need.
One more reason is love this is that I personally sit on the edge of being able to consolidate numerous servers at serverbeach into very few on EC2 as AWS enthusiasts turn S3 into a mountable filesystem. That's to say hardrive space for a server is limitless. One could do such a thing remotely, but if using one great AWS service why not just meld the two?
There have been some cons thus far:
- I have the feeling Amazon is still feeling people out on how they want to use the services. That gives some people the willy nillies.
Improvements seem to just pop out without any published roadmap. This might not be the case totally as AWS does what I need ATM & so I haven't needed to track one down.
Acct. availability. I begged.
[04.04.07 02:05 PM]
We just got approved for an EC2 account and I am very excited about testing our two-factor authentication system on the Amazon cloud. Unlike the companies you mentioned, we don't (currently) intend to run one big service, rather we will make it easy for our customers to set up their own.
I suspect that initially this will be attractive to ASPs who need two-factor authentication, probably for admin accounts or critical information since authentication is typically an inside the firewall affair. However, a WiKID server could also function as a fail-over server, which could be very economical.
I think rpath is interesting. However, we have not found it hard to create our own ISOs and VMware images. I think the value add comes from promotion and that is where Amazon could really shine. Will I be able to sell WiKID Strong Authentication servers to corporate customers through Amazon? Will you see "People who bought "Securing Linux" also bought a WiKID Strong Authentication server on the EC2 marketplace"? :)
[04.04.07 03:09 PM]
snowvision.com uses S3 to host their videos.
[04.05.07 01:06 PM]
WeoGeo (http://www.weogeo.com) is a portal and server solution for the global mapping industry, employing powerful systems to handle data volumes ranging from megabytes to terabytes. The portal solution is built entirely on AWS. I have written several recent blogs (http://blogs.weogeo.com/pbissett) about the advantages of AWS and buying computing cycles versus the hardware itself.
To provide increased robustness and durability for commodity computing cycles, we developed an internal EC2 management solution called WeoCEO. Now available as a product, WeoCEO (http://www.weoceo.com) provides solutions for stable IP address, fail-safe monitoring, load balancing, and automated scaling of EC2 resources - all of which translates to substantial spike insurance and significant cost savings for our geospatial solutions.
[04.05.07 02:46 PM]
Hanzo have three archiving services running on AWS.
- Hanzoweb - archiving the public web controlled by end users. Hanzoweb archives blogs, feeds, web sites, using a range of crawlers.
- Hanzo Enterprise - archive corporate web spaces, internal and external, private or public.
- Hanzo archive API - any application can store its content or transactions in a private or public archive on demand.
Our archive engine is built around AWS, enabling scaling on demand and utility-style billing, lowering the entry point for our customers. This meets one of our key corporate goals: to commoditise web archiving.
[04.06.07 02:21 AM]
I've been developing a new financial portfolio management and sharing application called SteamStreet using EC2 and S3. It's not really the prototypical S3-type application, because it doesn't require lots of storage or processing, but it's still been extremely valuable. Probably the most interesting thing is how much it changes your thinking about design. I'm thinking much more horizontally, using S3 for caching and designing for scalability by adding more EC2 instances. The cost issues are also great, because it doesn't require us to pre-commit to servers prior to actually seeing how things go.
I've been keeping an eye on the WeoCEO product that Paul discussed, and am also considering that for automating the deployment of new instances.
I've got a blog discussing how the product is being built, and I'll be adding more info about how we use S3 in the future: http://blog.steamstreet.com/buildingsteamstreet.
You can sign up for beta notification now at http://www.steamstreet.com
[04.06.07 03:13 AM]
We built our email data backups system using S3, EC2 and SQS... http://www.webmail.us/data-backups
[04.06.07 06:43 AM]
Anybody figured out how to do any kind of reasonably big and reliable (clustered or whatnot) databases on EC2? I believe you only get 160G of disk, as I doubt Oracle or Mysql would use S3 for storing table data..
Thanks
[04.06.07 02:06 PM]
Here's a cool app: There's a consumer play called Jungledisk that allows you to simply create a web-disk out of S3 for your laptop....
And Here's a Cool future: Cassatt (http://www.cassatt.com) has software that essentially creates a utility compute "cloud" out of what enterprises already have in their data centers. Hardware/network is pooled, and application images are essentially deployed into the pool, with SLAs attached. Cassatt automates how resources get applied as load dictates. BUT what's neat, is instead of allocating *internal* compute resources, it could selectively choose *external* resources like EC2 if there was a huge peak demand (a kind of "spill-over" control).
[04.08.07 12:59 PM]
Hi Surj, long time no see, I saw a link to this post on the AWS Blog.
My online music-mixing startup Jamglue uses S3 to store all uploaded audio files, as well as user avatars, and even CSS, Javascript and site images.
We also use EC2 to create the final mp3s of songs that users mix together in our flash-based mixing tool.
They're both working really well for us so far (we launched in December), let me know if you have any questions.
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Steve Mallett [04.04.07 01:19 PM]
My new start-up, Gigantic Labs is building web apps strictly on AWS. Also, a video blogging company, Cinemati.ca (EC2 version) I'm an advisor to is now moving to AWS.