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Friday, May 08, 2009
I wish I could say that their is something amazing that I did differently from everyone else who has hosted on EC2, but that’s just not so. Once you get an EC2 instance running, the rest of the process is identical to connecting to a virtual machine anywhere. If you need to add additional Windows components, the directions in this post are dynamite. If you use the management console, the directions on the Amazon article are pretty easy to map to actions in the UI without much thought. So, you are deploying to a virtual machine that is easily duplicated across the Amazon EC2 infrastructure. I would say that the strongest reason to use EC2 is that you already know how to use it. A second reason to use EC2 over your own data center is this: if you are using S3 and SimpleDB, you don’t pay for ...
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EC2
Utility Computing
Amazon Web Services
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Friday, April 24, 2009
Last night (4-23), I saw that Amazon is now offering IBM applications by the hour. I thought “Cool!” Then I took a look at the pricing for these things. This pricing doesn’t take effect if you already own IBM licenses for the products and just want to host on EC2. If you own licenses, IBM has a table up to show you how to convert from Processor Value Units (PVUs) to EC2. These prices are for preconfigured Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) with the IBM software ready to rock—no extra salesmen need to get involved. All that said, I have no idea how much a PVU costs for an application, but my guess is it costs “a lot”. A project I was on in 2007 required an IBM C Compiler to run on Z/OS (it was needed to interpret SQL statements into C programs that could run as stored procedures ...
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EC2
Amazon Web Services
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Monday, April 13, 2009
Back in February, I walked through the development of a Photo storage application. The application originally comes from one of the examples in the REST book Kenn Scribner and I wrote, Effective REST Services via .NET. Photo sharing and uploads allow for me to present a well understood application without providing a lot of background. For a photo, you upload it somewhere and store metadata about the photo itself. We already covered Google App Engine in February. For this application, we will use Amazon Web Services, including SimpleDB, Simple Storage Service, and Elastic Compute Cloud. At the end, I’ll tell you what I thought of the experience. I’ll develop the application in F#. When I presented this code to the Midwest Cloud Computing Users Group for the April 2009 meeting, Amanda Laucher offered up that my use of F# used some idioms she hadn’t seen before. That’s a ...
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EC2
Utility Computing
S3
Amazon Web Services
SimpleDB
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Friday, April 10, 2009
The Amazon Web Services Management Console is SIGNIFICANTLY easier to use than the command line applications one must use to manage an EC2 instance. I had puzzled out all the commands and got things working. Tonight, I stumbled across the AWS Management Console: https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/. It’s a nice, point and click interface to setup an Amazon Machine Instance (AMI), bundle that instance into a bucket, figure out connection credentials, setup common security groups, etc. The interface has the advantage of telling me exactly how far along the system has gone with each step. This was particularly nice when bundling my AMI. Without the feedback, I wouldn’t have known what was going on for the 20 or so minutes where the instance was paused and packaged. The service even handles storing the image in your S3 account. I also had to install IIS tonight. The console made it easy to create ...
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EC2
S3
Amazon Web Services
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Friday, March 13, 2009
Amazon just announced a reserved instances plan for EC2. This new option significantly reduces costs for Linux/UNIX users. This option is not available for Windows users as of this time. The way it appears to work is this: User buys block of hours that is good for a 1 or 3 year term. User consumes hours and has this usage debited from the prepaid block of time. If the user fails to consume their hours within the 1 or 3 year term, the money is gone. The 1 year blocks sell 10833 hours. The 3 year blocks represent 16667 hours. For comparison, a week has 168 hours, a year has 8760 or 8784 hours (leap year dependent). Here's a cost comparison of the offerings: 1 yr Block of hours Pay as you go 3 yr Block of hours Pay as you go Standard/Small $325.00 $1,083.33 $500.00 $1,666.67 Standard/Medium...
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EC2
Utility Computing
Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Web Services
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009
I originally presented this talk to the Azure Cloud Computing User Group on February 25, 2009. Thanks to Bryce Calhoun for inviting me to present! The original meeting announcement had this summary: Scott Seely, Architect at MySpace, will kick off the meeting with a 20-30 minute overview of the top three cloud computing offerings available today: Google App Engine, Amazon EC3 and Azure Services. His discussion will be primarily focused on a compare/contrast of the functionality and features inherent to each platform. Enjoy!
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CloudFront
Azure
Google App Engine
EC2
Simple Storage Service
Cloud Computing
Utility Computing
Elastic Compute Cloud
Cloud Storage
SQS
S3
Simple Queue Service
Amazon Web Services
SimpleDB
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009
I'll be speaking Wednesday night at the Cloud Computing User Group in Downers Grove, IL. I have a short presentation on the main computing platforms. If you are a regular reader, you know that I've been spending some time going beneath the surface on major platforms. If folks like the high level overview, I'll do some more in depth talks in the future. Here are the details and the announcement that Bryce Calhoun sent out: Join us for the third local meeting of the Cloud Computing User Group – this month in Downers Grove. At this meeting, we will be learning about how Live ID integration works in the Azure cloud computing platform. We’ll demo and dig into the code of an application built in the cloud that integrates directly with the Live ID service and stores information specific to the individual associated with that ID. Also, Scott Seely, Architect ...
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Azure
Google App Engine
EC2
Simple Storage Service
Cloud Computing
Utility Computing
SQS
S3
Simple Queue Service
Amazon Web Services
SimpleDB
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Wednesday, February 04, 2009
I have found a need to do some research across the various cloud offerings so that I get good feel for what each has to offer. At this point in my investigations, I am focusing on only three platforms: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google App Engine. The three have common sets of features: storage through an API, compute resources, and ability to respond to demand by scaling application instances. The storage APIs encourage scalable patterns over patterns that could cause data contention. Amazon requires that the application handle scale up and down on its own. Azure and App Engine scale for the user through a combination of configuration and observed demand. These services also offer authentication services as well as the ability to create your own authentication. App Engine integrates with Google logins, Azure works with Windows Live, and Amazon through security mechanisms in the Amazon Machine Instances. ...
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CloudFront
Azure
Google App Engine
EC2
Simple Storage Service
Cloud Computing
Utility Computing
Elastic Compute Cloud
Cloud Storage
SQS
S3
Simple Queue Service
Amazon Web Services