YouTube - Amazon EC2 Tutorial

YouTube - Amazon EC2 Tutorial: "Amazon EC2: Launching a linux based web server on EC2 via the FireFox EC UI plugin and connecting via SSH."

Amazon Web Services Blog: Taking Massive Distributed Computing to the Common Man - Hadoop on Amazon EC2/S3

Amazon Web Services Blog: Taking Massive Distributed Computing to the Common Man - Hadoop on Amazon EC2/S3: "Everyday, I hear new stories about running Hadoop on EC2. For example, The New York Times used 100 Amazon EC2 instances and a Hadoop application to process 4TB of raw image TIFF data (stored in S3) into 1.1 million finished PDFs in the space of 24 hours at a computation cost of just $240. It not only makes massive distributed processing easy but also makes it headache-free.

Whether it is Startup companies or University Classrooms in UCSB, BYU, Stanford or even enterprise companies, its just amazing to see every new story that is utilizing Hadoop on Amazon EC2/S3 in innovative ways.

That’s what I love about Amazon Web Services - a common man with just a credit card can afford to think about massive distributed computing and compete with the rest and emerge to the top."

OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2

OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2: "Sun and Amazon Web Services are opening a private beta program starting on May 5, 2008. Approved beta users get access to OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2.

In addition, Sun is now offering 24x7 technical support for its MySQL database running on EC2 and Linux."

Note: I blogged this as it provides a link to the Sun Microsystems site -- SC

Amazon Now Serving OpenSolaris on EC2 - GigaOM

Amazon Now Serving OpenSolaris on EC2 - GigaOM: "During our on-stage chat at Startup Camp, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz hinted at some big news involving Amazon and its web services. Today, the company officially announced:

* Sun’s OpenSolaris OS will be available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) customers for free. It is in beta for now.
* Sun will provide premium technical support for MySQL database running on Linux and Amazon EC2.

These developments are meant to address the needs and complaints of the developer community. OpenSolaris, which comes with tools such as ZFS and Dynamic Tracing (D-Trace), will be offered for free, in contrast to some Linux offerings that cost money. For instance, if you sign up for EC2 and pick RedHat, it costs $19. ZFS allows instant rollback and continual check-summing capabilities, something developers have found lacking in the EC2 platform. This OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 beta is currently available by invitation only."

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference | Werner Vogels

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference | Werner Vogels: "One of the key difficulties in running and managing an internet business lies in building a technical infrastructure that can handle spikes in traffic but which remains cost-effective for normal operations. In other words, businesses often need to be able to scale up or down at a moment's notice."

A Web-Scale Computing Architecture

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference | Werner Vogels: "One of the key difficulties in running and managing an internet business lies in building a technical infrastructure that can handle spikes in traffic but which remains cost-effective for normal operations. In other words, businesses often need to be able to scale up or down at a moment's notice.

These problems affect companies of all sizes and are as relevant to an enterprise trying to shave costs as they are to a start-up.Werner Vogels presents the Amazon solution and shows how their S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) offerings provide a blueprint for 'Web-Scale Computing'. Vogels contends that this allows businesses to outsource their 'heavy lifting' and implement an elastic business model that can quickly respond to demand.

Vogels introduces customers who are already using these business models. One of these is our very own Doug Kaye, who describes how Gigavox Media is exploiting the potential of Amazon's web services."

Amazon Web Services Blog: New Release of ElasticFox

Amazon Web Services Blog: New Release of ElasticFox: "New Release of ElasticFox

Many people have told me that they have used the ElasticFox extension for Firefox to get started with Amazon EC2. ElasticFox makes it easy to see the list of available AMIs (Amazon Machine Images), to launch any number of instances of those AMIs, and to monitor and manage the running instances:

Elastic_fox_14_2

We just released version 1.4 of this powerful tool. In addition to wiping out some bugs related to security groups and key management, ElasticFox now supports all of the features of the newest version of the EC2 API - Availability Zones, Elastic IPs, and user-selectable kernels. There are new tabs for kernels and ramdisks, Elastic IPs, and Availability Zones:"

Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today.

Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today.: "AWS trades heavily on the fact that Amazon itself is the biggest customer. 'We tend to build the things people are asking for internally,' Jassy says. And the idea that AWS is mostly about wringing extra bucks (especially off-season) out of Amazon's data centers? 'We've far exceeded the excess capacity of our internal system,' Jassy says. 'That ship sailed 18 months ago.' For a company at which operational data is a state secret, that's a telling detail: AWS is now big enough to be piling up its own silicon."

Cloud Tools for EC2

"WS Short Takes for Friday, April 18, 2008
from Amazon Web Services Blog by AWS Editor

I met developer Chris Richardson in Philadelphia last month. Chris is a seasoned Java developer and the author of POJOs in Action.

He told me that he had just released CloudTools. This is a set of tools for deploying and testing Java EE applications on Amazon EC2. It consists of AMIs that are configured to work with Apache Tomcat and to work with EC2Deploy, the EC2Deploy core framework (described here), and a Maven plugin which uses EC2Deploy. Once the plugin has been configured, one command will launch the appropriate number of EC2 instances, configure a master MySQL database, populate it with data, configure zero or more MySQL slaves, configure one or more Tomcat servers, deploy the actual web application, and then configure an Apache instance which will load balance across all of the Tomcat instances (whew!).

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2: "Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2

This is a Mozilla Firefox extension for interacting with Amazon EC2 (API version 2007-08-29). The source code also functions as an example of how to use the Amazon EC2 Query API from JavaScript."

A video that walks through the process of running an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from Windows.

Amazon EC2 Getting Started Video

See the Getting Started Guide and the related technical documentation for a written version of these steps. Also, check out the attached transcript of the video, courtesy of CastingWords and Amazon Mechanical Turk.