Amazon Web Services Minneapolis presentation

Posted by Andy Atkinson on September 14, 2007

Mike Culver, evangelist for Amazon Web Services (AWS), visited the University of Minnesota Wednesday September 5th, to describe services Amazon has made available to the public over the last few years. He mentioned Jeff Barr was an office mate of his (I've seen his presentation via Google Video Opening Up: Sharing Data and Technology as a Growth Strategy) and I also saw Jinesh Varia present at Twin Cities Code Camp last year, another AWS Evangelist. Mike's presentation was more technical than those two however, since he demonstrated starting up a virtual machine instance (the EC2 web service) in addition to general service overviews. The event was hosted by the Twin Cities Linux Users Group, so audience questions were quite technical and specific.

Amazon e-commerce service (ECS)

This was the first web service Amazon offered, and is still easiest to understand, as it's basically public access to the Amazon product inventory. Developers are encouraged to do things like recommendations, predictions, historical sales analysis, or simply integrate a shopping cart (via Amazon) into their websites. I've used a Java applet that is available on their site to query for some products by the Amazon ID (ASIN), and after playing with it for just a few minutes, I started to brainstorm new ways to present or group that data. Sign-up for a free Amazon API key and start playing around with the Amazon library.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

S3 is an online storage service that is quite popular with some folks. Data is immediately replicated to other data centers, an advantage it has over competing storage services. S3 does not support hierarchical data, though Mike described a way objects (files) could be uploaded into buckets (directories) such that they are named with slashes, then code could treat the slashes like directories of a file system. There was also interest from the crowd as to whether anyone had a relational database program running using S3, and Mike said he's seen one.

Using DNS tricks, files can be served from S3 instead of the local server, in anticipation of heavy traffic. Mike gave an example of live-blogging from MacWorld, but using S3 to serve content instead of the normal web servers, which allowed this particular blogger to meet the heavy peak demand while still keeping the bandwidth bill relatively low.

Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug, who I've corresponded with a bit through this site, says SmugMug has saved $1 million dollars by using S3 (and continues saving).

Amazon elastic compute cloud (EC2)

This service is virtualization for a (low) fee. Users can pay for a virtual machine instance at a rate of $0.10/clock hour. Virtual machines are Amazon machine instances (AMI) running Fedora Core 4 Linux out of the box (as of this writing) with equivalent specs to around 1.7Ghz CPU and 1.5GB memory. Machine instances are stored in S3.

Mike described public/private key encryption of service, and demonstrated starting an instance. AMIs have all ports blocked by default, so he used a Java-based CLI tool to open up port 22 (SSH) and 80 (HTTP).

A marketplace for "custom" AMIs, which are generally Linux distributions with application stacks installed on top of them, has emerged for users willing to pay for something more than the default installed image. The particular AMI he logged-in to was Linux plus Apache. Mike said virtual machine instances take about 2-6 minutes to start up.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) are stored in the Simple Queue Service. Most rewards for HIT completion are $0.02 or $0.02, but Mike mentioned there are $5 HITs, however they don't last long in the system because many people are looking for the best-paying HITs.

The Sheep Market project used Mechanical Turk as a part of the business plan to develop hand-made drawings of sheep. The developer collected 10,000 sheep sketches, then sells a physical print of 20 sheep for $20, in the form of lickable stamps. The developer of the site paid artists just $0.69 on average per sheep, a $0.31 profit margin. Selling blocks of 20 sheep would yield a profit of $6.20 (before other expenses). I haven't seen any data on whether this has been profitable yet, but it certainly demonstrates a unique utilization of Mechanical Turk.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Mike didn't spend much time discussing SQS, though he did say it stores HITs for Mechanical Turk. When a person selects an available HIT, an element in the SQS is dequeued. Read more about SQS here.

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS)

Mike just touched on this service, partially since it was recently released, and partially because we ran out of time. The main news is that consumers have a cost effective way of accepting micropayments (very small monetary payments, just $0.01 for example) by using their Amazon accounts instead of credit cards, which incur fees that are too high for small businesses. Jungle Payments has an implementation of FPS.

Further reading

About the author(s)

Andy started Pain in the Tech in 2005 as a way to share tips and tutorials with friends and family, and evangelize great products and services. By 2008, Pain in the Tech had 7 contributors, thousands of daily page views. Site ownership was transitioned to Matt Thommes in 2008.

Comments