Webware

A central part of Amazon's online computing foundation is growing up.

The Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that gives customers on-demand access to Linux servers, is now out of beta testing, said Jeff Barr, evangelist for the collection of online options collectively called Amazon Web Services.

"Amazon EC2 is now in full production," Barr said in a blog post Thursday. And as promised, EC2 now offers Windows in a beta test, joining Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition.

Along with those moves, EC2 now comes with a service level agreement, a formal commitment that the service will be available at least 99.95 percent of the time. This type of agreement makes it easier for businesses to place faith in the service. Previously, only the only AWS component with a service level agreement was the Simple Storage Service (S3), which provides online data storage.

Customers pay for AWS according to how much they need: more servers, more storage space, and more network capacity means more charges. But unlike with computing infrastructure built in-house, when customers don't need it anymore, they can stop paying for it. AWS has had outages, but it continues to gain in popularity, and Amazon has been lowering some AWS prices.

Amazon collects multiple gigabits of monitoring data each second for its Elastic Compute Cloud servce.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Barr also described features that signal growing sophistication for AWS overall in 2009 that should make it easier to administer AWS--either manually or by letting it run itself better. Barr listed four areas:

• Management Console: The management console will simplify the process of configuring and operating your applications in the AWS cloud. You'll be able to get a global picture of your cloud computing environment using a point-and-click web interface.

• Load Balancing: The load-balancing service will allow you to balance incoming requests and traffic across multiple EC2 instances.

• Automatic Scaling: The auto-scaling service will allow you to grow and shrink your usage of EC2 capacity on demand based on application requirements.

• Cloud Monitoring: The cloud-monitoring service will provide real time, multidimensional monitoring of host resources across any number of EC2 instances, with the ability to aggregate operational metrics across instances, Availability Zones, and time slots.

In a separate blog post, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogel described some of Amazon's work in ensuring reliability and efficiency.

"We relentlessly measure every possible resource usage parameter, every application counter, and every customer's experience. Many gigabits per second of monitoring data flows continuously through the Amazon networks to make sure that our customers are getting serviced at the levels they can expect and at an efficiency level the business desires," Vogel said.

Among the customers using the Windows version of EC2 are Autodesk, RenderRocket, and Eli Lilly, Amazon said.

"This is a huge step forward in maximizing our results relative to IT spend, and now that Amazon EC2 runs Windows and SQL Server, we have even greater flexibility in the kinds of applications we can build in the AWS cloud," Dave Powers, an Eli Lilly associate information consultant who uses the service to process research data, gushed in a statement.

Autodesk uses EC2 for back-end data processing tasks, said Mike Haley, a senior architect of search engineering, and RenderRocket uses the service for 3D film and TV graphics work for TV and movies, Amazon said.

Amazon.com has announced that it is dropping prices for heavy users of its hosted storage service, S3. The baseline monthly fee of 15 cents per gigabyte of storage remains, but high-volume users will be able to take advantage of a tiered pricing model.

After 50 terabytes, the cost goes down to 14 cents a gigabyte; for more than 500TB, it's at 12 cents. See the new pricing chart.

I asked an Amazon representative if the company is reducing prices just because it could, or if it was the company's way of helping to bail out tech companies that are going to be finding it harder to fund ongoing operations. The answer is the former:

Through increased scale and operational innovations, we've been able to lower the cost of running Amazon S3. We've always said we would pass on savings to our customers when we could, and we're doing so again now.

We have a relentless focus on reducing our operational costs for hardware, storage, and other aspects of operating the Amazon Web Services' infrastructure. In addition, with greater scale (S3 now houses >29 billion objects) have come further efficiencies. As we continue to reduce these costs, we're able to pass the savings on to our customers.

Any small amount of additional flotation will no doubt be welcomed by tech companies today, though entrepreneurs may also want to heed Richard Stallman's warning: cloud computing is "stupidity."

Google plans to release later this week a near-final version of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5, software designed to ease the onerous parts of writing sophisticated Web-based software.

GWT 1.5 includes support for Java 5, a version of the Sun Microsystems programming language released in 2006, and produces software that runs about 1.2 to 2 times faster for complex Web applications, said Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager for GWT.

The new software fuels Google's ambition to make the Web a much richer software environment--an ambition on display Wednesday and Thursday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Johnson believes the Web is already "really close" to the abilities of personal computers as a software foundation.

"We've observed that there's no question anymore whether you're going to target the browser or a desktop app. For almost any new exciting app, you're going to target the browser," Johnson said. "For the right set of applications, it's already better than what you can do on the desktop. For extremely low-latency applications, like video editing, I think we're still a couple years out."

Google is trying to shift people toward the Web, hoping to profit indirectly by spurring more Internet searches, its main source of revenue. It's also got some direct but much smaller businesses, including subscription fees for corporate use of online Google Apps such as its spreadsheet and calendar. Also at Google I/O, the company is revealing the fees for heavy users of its new Google App Engine service to host Web applications.

App Engine, which was unveiled in April and now has about 60,000 approved users, is free for starter applications requiring 500MB of storage and network bandwidth to support about 5 million page views a month, Google said. On Wednesday, the service will be open to the 150,000 who've signed up so far and to any others who want to join.

Beyond that, Google will charge 10 to 12 cents per hour of processor core work, plus 15 to 18 cents per gigabyte of storage per month, plus 11 to 13 cents per gigabyte of data transferred out, plus 9 to 11 cents per gigabyte of data transferred in. The fees are similar in broad structure to that of a competing service from Amazon.

GWT: Doing the grunt work
GWT lets programmers write their code in Java, but then converts that raw material into the JavaScript language that's built into Web browsers. One advantage of GWT is that it can handle the significant differences in how different browsers handle JavaScript, Google argues.

"Not all the JavaScript standards are interpreted in different ways," Johnson said. "The truth is it's a minefield."

GWT supports most modern browsers, including recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (and other Webkit-based browsers such as that of the iPhone and Google Android), and Opera.

Sun introduced more changes to Java with the current Java 6, but it was Java 5 that introduced several changes to the language. Among them (brace yourself if you're not a coder): generics, enumerated types, annotations, enhanced for/loop syntax, and autoboxing.

Supporting those newer features makes GWT less different from other Java programming environments, cuts down on opportunities for programmer mistakes, and can help GWT produce faster JavaScript, Johnson said.

GWT uses the Eclipse project's JDT to understand people's Java code, then adds a Google-engineered component that translates it into JavaScript, Johnson said.

It's open-source software, and "We get dozens and dozens of patches" from outside contributors. Among those in the current release is support for right-to-left languages such as Arabic.

It's just like an unformatted hard drive, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels explained. The difference is that it's in the "cloud" somewhere and you get to it through an API.

Amazon Web Services executives on Sunday described a forthcoming persistent storage feature, called EC2 Persistent Storage, which they say will make its hosted computing services more flexible and far more reliable.

People can sign up for an early beta test program now before Amazon opens it up for a wider release later this year.

The service works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) hosted server offering. It allows developers to set aside a storage volume online, on which people save files in different file systems. This differs from what is available now with EC2 because once a compute instance is taken offline, the data associated with it goes away.

With a persistent storage service, data can remain linked to a specific computing instance. Significantly, people can take a snapshot of that data and store it on Amazon's S3 storage service. That effectively acts as a way to create a back-up of their computing operation on the "cloud," according to Amazon executives.

"The snapshot is extremely powerful technology and allows for building highly fault-tolerant applications operating worldwide. Combine these snapshots with Availability Zones and Elastic IPs and you have all the tools to manage and migrate even the most complex of applications," Vogels wrote on his blog.

"And the great thing is it that it is all done with using standard technologies such that you can use this with any kind of application, middleware or any infrastructure software, whether it is legacy or brand new," he added.

Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr also describes the service on his blog, saying it was one of the most requested features from developers.

Thorsten vok Eiken at RightScale, who has been testing the service, talks about the implications of this feature and says his company is making tools to make it easier to use these services.

Von Eiken says that persistent storage is a dramatically important feature that will lead many more companies and developers to hosted development platforms.

"It's going to be like agile software development: if you want to survive as an Internet/Web service you will have to compute in the cloud or your competitors will leave you in the dust by being able to deploy faster, better, and cheaper," he said.

On February 15 this year, Amazon S3, the "cloud" storage service that's part of the Amazon Web Services suite of infrastructure applications, failed. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs who had been attracted to AWS based on its promised reliability and low cost had their confidence shaken. Several lost revenue when the service seized up.

Last week at the Under the Radar conference, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels sat down to an interview with Robert Scoble. The discussion of course came around to the S3 outage, and Vogels explained what happened. It was, he says, a "provisioning" and "logical" problem. Translated: They didn't program S3 to handle the load they got. It has since been fixed. Amazon also recently upgraded its hosted computing service, EC2.

But while Vogels expressed unhappiness at the outage, he also believes that Amazon's cloud services are still more reliable than any collection of servers a budding Web start-up could marshal. While that may be true, that's not what companies who signed up for AWS signed up to hear. We think a simple mea culpa would have gone over better.

I'm always on the lookout for simple ways to manage video on the Web. One of them, called Mux has been getting some buzz lately for taking advantage of both Amazon's EC2 and S3 Web services to store data and do the crunching at the same time. Mux uses the two services together to serves as a video ripper and converter, letting you grab videos off a small handful of popular sites and save them locally or send them to your mobile phone. It'll also take any file on your computer and convert it without the need for software or CPU cycles.

Crunch files on someone else's servers with Mux.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Apple's iPhone users also get a treat, as Mux is setup to convert Flash videos on the fly to make them playable on the device. The only caveat is that you have to enter the URL in the mobile application, which would be a whole heck of a lot easier if the iPhone had a way to copy and paste. I tried it out on a few videos from around the Web and had mixed results. A surprising amount of video sites have done as much as possible to support mobile phones without Flash, including CollegeHumor, Break, and Dailymotion. However, those that don't work without Flash on cell phones, such as Vimeo and MySpace, simply crashed the converter.

Another reason Mux is useful is for the folks who don't want to have to plug in their phones to a computer to sync their media. You can simply send entire Web clips over to your phone using SMS. As long as you've got a data plan you can access the link anytime you want to watch or download the full video. It's very handy.

Mux was created by the same team who did Cruxy, a media distributing service that debuted at the Under the Radar Media conference last summer.

See also: ZamZar and iDesktop.tv

Update 2:20 p.m. PST: I added some more details and a reaction.

Amazon.com has begun publicly testing a third element to its online computing services: a database capability called SimpleDB.

The new Web service joins two others the online retailer launched in 2006 that anyone can pay to use: computing horsepower called the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and data storage called Simple Storage Service (S3). SimpleDB works in conjunction with those services, letting customers store, modify, and query data, the company said Friday.

"Amazon SimpleDB provides quick, efficient storage and retrieval of your data to support high performance Web applications," the company said on its SimpleDB Web site. "Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database--real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data--without the operational complexity."

The service costs 14 cents per hour per for each SimpleDB machine, plus a data transfer fee. Transferring data into the database costs 10 cents per gigabyte, while transferring it out costs 18 cents per gigabyte for the first 10 terabyte transferred per month, 16 cents for the next 40 terabytes transferred per month, and 13 cents per gigabyte per month after that.

The service is in limited beta, with customers able to sign up on a first-come, first-served basis, Amazon.com said.

Amazon declined to say what software underlies the service. "We don't talk about the internal software, but I can tell you that we use many different technologies with the criteria that they have to be massively scalable and highly reliable," spokeswoman Kay Kinton said.

The online retailer has been expanding its online services of late. It's also begun beta testing another service running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on EC2.

Amazon cloud-computing customer include blog-hosting site Wordpress and photo-sharing site SmugMug.

SmugMug CEO Chris MacAskill gave the technology a qualified thumb-sup in a blog posting Friday. "SimpleDB should be screaming fast, incredibly scalable, and almost all of our SQL (database) queries would work with no changes other than syntax. Like many of you, I'm sure, we're using much of our RDBMS (relational database management software) as a fairly simple data store and aren't using many advanced RDBMS capabilities." One problem, though, is waiting for Amazon's remote database to a request from a local server.

For some more technical details, the Inside Looking Out blog has some, and Amazon has a SimpleDB developer guide.

The divide between Web IM apps and the software versions is getting smaller, albeit with the help of improved bandwidth and technology like Adobe's Flash. In the same vein, Meebo, the popular Web-based multiclient chat platform is getting a handy update tonight. Users are now able to trade files with each other right in the chat window. It's not just Meebo users, either, it's anyone on your friends list. If your buddy has a file-transfer-enabled client, you'll be able to pass files back and forth freely.

However, unlike software IM clients, the caps for file transfer are very stringent at 10MB per file, and 30MB of total transfers per month, meaning you're not going to be able to pass around video clips or other large files, especially to more than one or two buddies, before hitting your limit.

The Meebo team has employed a combination of Amazon's Web Services to make the transferring possible, including EC2 for scaling and S3 for storage. Safari and Opera users are out of luck, however; the Meebo team has only got it working for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Safari support is on the way "soon." In the meantime, the upgrade is good for casual and occasional file swapping, but with these limits you're better off sticking to e-mail attachments or a quick-and-dirty file-drop-and-share service like Divshare.

Previous Meebo Coverage:
Meebo relaunches improved iPhone chat app
Meebo now works on the iPhone (kinda)
Meebo launching media-enabled chat rooms
Meebo releases supersimple site chat

Send (small) files to your friends sans software with Meebo. You'll notice a new 'send file' button in your chat windows starting tonight.

(Credit: Meebo.com / CNET Networks)