AWS Blog

I was also disappointed in the statement of price drops - that marketing-statement of price drops alone makes me look around for alternatives. And the statement below, "Our limits exist primarily to prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot" - well that is just arrogant. If I aim at my feet, let me be a fool and pull the trigger. It is nice to see that Amazon now offers Postgresql: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/11/amazon-rds-for-postgresql-now-avail… The old plans with 1TB and 500 connections made me feel comfortably ignorant of our needs, but with the new plans I must contemplate connection limits and storage capacity, and I really like not thinking about that at all. With that said, the new features with HA and rollback is a needed addition. But I would be more likely to use HA if I could just create a follower and for an extra $50 make it automatic failover.

AdRoll. San Francisco, CA. H1B welcome. Turns out ad tech has some of the most interesting problems you'll find anywhere. AdRoll's engineers are conquering problems in big data (HBase), machine learning (Mahout), real-time processing (Erlang/Storm/Kafka) and UX (Backbone). We make this stuff work for almost 10,000 customers. We're looking for smart, hungry folks across the board. * In recent weeks, we were named the "Best Place To Work" in SF (mid-sized tech). http://blog.adroll.com/best-places-to-work-sf-biz-times * Our tech stack was featured on the Amazon's AWS blog a few weeks back: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/04/real-time-ad-impression-b.... * We were recently ranked the fasting growing private company in California by Inc magazine: http://www.inc.com/profile/adroll Email us at [email protected] or visit http://www.adroll.com/about/careers.

Source of paraphrasing: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/05/amazon-route-53-elb-integration-dns…

It's worth noting that if you want to fully leverage the scalability of S3, using your domain registrar's HTTP 302 service (using a "URL Redirect" feature at your domain registrar) is likely a bad idea. ismytwitterpasswordsecure.com resolves to 192.31.186.144, which is some unknown HTTP server at Namecheap, meanwhile www.ismytwitterpasswordsecure.com resolves to a CNAME that causes the browser to directly hit Amazon. As mentioned by another commenter, the "proper" solution to this which doesn't depend on Namecheap's unknown quality HTTP server serving up redirects, is to use Amazon's DNS hosting and their proprietary aliasing solution: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/12/root-domain-website-hosting-for-ama…

More details can be found in my blog post at http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/02/create-a-backup-website-using-route… .

All I need is to handle the HTTP requests for the "directory" of videos. Have you considered just using Amazon S3, especially now they offer full 'httpd'-like functionality (no more bucket XML listings if you try to visit the root of the domain). http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-on-amazon-… If you are running a CDN in front to stream the content, this sounds like the best solution to me. You could probably get away with Reduced Redundancy Storage too if you have backups.

I don't think so. Amazon has a habit of using third party services for their blogs. This particular team may just have opted for WordPress.com, instead of TypePad, like they usually do (see http://aws.typepad.com).

AWS blog is on Typepad, so I'd say this is a step up for their publishing efforts http://aws.typepad.com/

the beanstalk programming model: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/aws-beanstalk-programming-model.htm… This is pretty cool, but for people targeting it because of no-hassle infiniscale, it must be noted that you either use SimpleDB or good old MySQL for storage. So AppEngine is still winner in that area, imvho, but it's great to see competition.

Yes but see here for an example of the smarter solution. That is: using RabbitMQ on AWS to get the best of both worlds. Link to AWS blog: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/12/running-everything-on-aws-soocialco…

I've run http://Dibs.net on EC2 for over a year, with images served up on S3. Several servers have uptimes since I booted them in June '07. I have nothing but good things to say about my experience with AWS. If you can, I highly recommend going to the AWS Start Up Tour (http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/2008-aws-start.html) It's a good place to meet people and last year Jeff Bezos and John Doerr showed up to the one in Palo Alto. Edit: Forgot to mention - I run PostgreSQL on instance storage with log shipping and backups to S3, and a couple of MySQL DBs for Cacti and geolocation lookups. EBS will help a lot in this area, which is kind of a pain right now. Can't wait to start using it.

"The New EC2 High Storage Instance Family" http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/12/the-new-ec2-high-storage-instance-f… " The High Storage Eight Extra Large (hs1.8xlarge) instances are a great fit for applications that require high storage depth and high sequential I/O performance. Each instance includes 117 GiB of RAM, 16 virtual cores (providing 35 ECU of compute performance), and 48 TB of instance storage across 24 hard disk drives capable of delivering up to 2.4 GB per second of I/O performance. This instance family is designed for data-intensive applications that require high storage density and high sequential I/O -- data warehousing, log processing, and seismic analysis (to name a few). We know that these applications can generate or consume tremendous amounts of data and that you want to be able to run them on EC2. The storage on this instance family is local, and has a lifetime equal to that of the instance. You should think of these instances as building blocks that you can use to build a complete storage system. You should build a degree of redundancy into your storage architecture (e.g. RAID 1, 5, or 6) and you should use a fault-tolerant file system like HDFS or Gluster. Of course, you should also back up your data to Amazon S3 for increased durability. "

IMO terminal protocols are more suited to UDP than TCP and I use ssh over UDP all the time. There are three main advantages: * There is no connection session, so you can close your laptop or put it to sleep and open it up again and the connection will still be there. * You don't have the lag of sending and then responding, it appears locally immediately * It is much easier to get UDP around firewalls and it can't be blocked easily in the same way most VPN protocols or SSH can. I have yet to find a network where I can't get my terminal UDP packets through. The alternative to Mosh is setting up OpenVPN[1]. It is especially worthwhile if you have a network of public servers that you administer. It is easy to setup[2] and works on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD etc. The best tip is to add a second interface to all your machines and setup a private VLAN across them. This way if you are experiencing a DoS attack or high traffic you can still login and administer the machine (this also applies with standard ssh - you put it in a different range of IPs and on your public machines then only have 80 and 443 open). EC2[3], Linode[4] et al all support adding a second network interface to each machine (or to just one of the machines, which is then used as a gateway to the remainder) which can be assigned an IP address in a different range. You then setup a separate hostname to this network, or even register a separate administrative domain name (eg. company-admin.com) which you keep on a…

What does running on Amazon mean (in 2006)? Remember, the company is officially Amazon.com, Inc., i.e. the ecommerce site turning tens of billions in revenue. Here's an excerpt from the Businessweek cover story[1] a few weeks after EC2's launch: > Amazon is starting to rent out just about everything it uses to run its own business, from rack space in its 10 million square feet of warehouses worldwide to spare computing capacity on its thousands of servers, data storage on its disk drives, and even some of the millions of lines of software code it has written to coordinate all that. Weeks later Bezos discussed the $2 billion investment in Amazon.com's infrastructure [2]. In effectively the same breath he mentioned 200,000 developers signed up for AWS. This is deliberately deceptive. Bezos linked AWS with Amazon.com's infrastructure, when the two are totally separate. Signs point towards EC2 coming about through the intransigence of a couple people [3], not through a deliberate effort by top brass to rent out Amazon.com's infrastructure. Implicating the main site was a tactic to inspire confidence and provoke experimentation. It's unclear whether EC2 would have found the same success had Amazon not papered over the inchoate AWS architecture by invoking the Amazon brand. I love AWS. Their blog is the only corporate blog I subscribe to, because everything they post is so friggin' cool. Sentences like these... > If you have ever searched Amazon.com, you've already used the…

My business (LabSlice) was just announced as a semi-finalist. I didn't even realize it was publicly announced until I clicked this link in the poster's blog: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/aws-start-up-challenge-2010-finalis… I am just a data point, but it's worth mentioning that LabSlice has no VC funding at all, and is truly a startup (ie. the website has only been online for a month or so). So on the one hand I can attest to some success, even without serious VC backing. On the other hand I will admit to surprise that the AWS competition classifies a startup as a business with less than $10M in revenues or $10M VC funding. Sure, they may technically be a startup, but they are in a much different league to the guy in the basement. In some ways it would be pragmatic to have a VC funded tier and a non-VC funded tier. That's the only way to differentiate businesses to give a better chance to the little guy. But in reality this is a competition that Amazon funded out of their pocket and they can call whatever rules they see fit.

I typically appreciate tptacek's security remarks, and agree that once you trust someone to view a photo, you're trusting them to not repost it. However, I disagree that "everyone is doing it this way" is a good reason to do it this way. Flickr, as I noted separately in this thread, doesn't do it this way. Changing privacy settings changes the URL, so someone using the URL (a common use case for images) can't use it any more. That's the "user expected" behavior. Facebook's behavior is a generally unwelcome surprise. Additionally, since you're considering building image hosting: "token protected" URLs are well understood and often applied as a best effort solution to this problem. A token protected URL typically has an expiry, and in typical use is only valid briefly when issued for the visitor requesting the (authenticated) page containing embedded photos. See: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/11/new-amazon-cloudfront-feature-priva… Of course, the CDN edge cache servers have to cache the object yet respect the tokens, which requires a bit more intelligence from the cache, which is why "general industry practice" is to take the easier shortcut of not protecting the URL and image object at all. Disclaimer: We offer token protected video and image CDN delivery, calling it "deep link protection". Our DLP, and token schemes in general, protect the link from misuse, not the asset.

fullasagoog.com techcrunch.com http://aws.typepad.com/?

The first EC2 beta launched in 2006, not 2002. Here's the official announcement from the AWS blog: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/08/amazon_ec2_beta.html The Wikipedia article is organized confusingly. It talks about the 2002 launch of "Amazon Web Services" which at the time was just an API for the Amazon retail catalog. Then for some reason it links to a press release about the 2009 release of "EC2 for Windows", then goes back to talk about earlier launches like MechTurk (2005), S3 (2006), and EC2 (2006). I'll see if I can clean up this mess... [Update: cleaned up the article and added some citations.] Note: I worked at Amazon.com from 2005 to 2008, the period when the company launched its first cloud computing services.

Amazon explains here: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/05/new-amazon-s3-reduced-redundancy-st… "If you store 10,000 objects with us, on average we may lose one of them every 10 million years or so."

It just went GA today: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2014/03/amazon-workspaces-now-available.htm…

The encryption that has been proposed does nothing to address the NSA issues. Amazon has a similar feature on S3 - they will encrypt your data on upload, and automatically decrypt it when you read it [1]. From a security perspective, this appears to be useless [2]. I suppose it might be useful if you're at an organisation with a rule saying "all data must be encrypted at rest" where the rule cannot be changed, but does not have to be implemented in an effective or useful manner. [1] http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/10/new-amazon-s3-server-side-encryptio… [2] http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/8765/what-does-amazons-s3-…

I like SSH. But I'm the founder of Userify ;) http://userify.com Also, S3 buckets cannot scale infinitely. This is a huge myth http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/amazon-s3-performance-tips-tricks-s…

You do have to pay for S3 to CloudFront traffic, so really you're paying twice. (Although the S3 to CF traffic might be cheaper than S3 to Internet, according to the Origin Server section on the Cloudfront pricing page.) http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ Also, S3 buckets cannot scale infinitely. They have to have their key names managed appropriately to do it. http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/amazon-s3-performance-tips-tricks-s… Finally :) I like SSH. But I'm the founder of Userify! http://userify.com

Another tip: IAM roles for EC2 instances. http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/06/iam-roles-for-ec2-instances-simplif… Basically, the apps you run on EC2 often need to access other AWS services. So you need to get AWS credentials onto your EC2 instances somehow, which is a nontrivial problem if you are automatically spinning up servers. IAM roles solve this by providing each EC2 instance with a temporary set of credentials in the instance metadata that gets automatically rotated. Libraries like boto know to transparently fetch, cache, and refresh the temporary credentials before making API calls. When you create an IAM role, you give it access to only the things it needs, e.g., read/write access to a specific S3 bucket, rather than access to everything.

According to the aws blog[1] you can now launch these instances from s3-backed AMIs. Its not clear if this still uses an ebs volume or if it can now use an instance volume. [1]: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2014/01/aws-update-new-m3-features-reduced-…

Not sure how this made it to the front page when it's essentially a rehash of the formal announcement and how-to from AWS's blog. http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/12/aws-management-console-auto-scaling…

Here's the announcement on the AWS blog - http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/11/amazon-rds-for-postgresql-now-avail…

This one seems to be about WorkSpaces: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/11/amazon-workspaces-desktop-computing… The one you linked is about AppStream

More on Jeff Barr's blog post: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/11/amazon-appstream-deliver-streaming-…

look at the TCO page for the announcement [1]. The biggest cost savings Amazon is touting lies in reduced IT staff and total elimination of hardware costs. By their calculations, the licensing is only 3% or $3 per seat for a 1,000 person business unit. [1] http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/11/tco-comparison-amazon-workspaces-an…