Custom Amazon EC2 Research and Development

We are now offering custom Amazon EC2 Research and Development services. If you are in need of custom EC2 instance deployment, feel free to contact us.

Timothy Meredith and I will be pioneering several custom deployments for clients and figured we'd offer these services to all other interested parties.

Pretty much any type of EC2 deployment on the Linux platform is where we are focused. Some examples are:

• Web Server
• Database Server
• Email Server
• SPAM Filter
• LDAP Server
• Video Server
• Image Server
• Utility Processing (Image resizing, video manipulation, etc.)

We will be posting specific packages and installations as they become available. Feel free to email kinlane@gmail.com if you have a specific instance configuration in mind that you need.

Amazon EC2 Custom Deployment

Had a meetup with a fellow developer friend of mine. He has been programming for years, but in the last 3-4 years become a real linux distribution and deployment expert. He works primarily on developing very specialized linux installs for specific purposes such as mail server, spam filtering, specialized web applications, and very focused utility solutions.

We are going to be working together to offer extremely specialized linux EC2 installations.

I have really got excited over the various possiblities for EC2 deployments for speciality need such as scalable Facebook applications, gaming server environments, utility processing, LDAP, data warehousing and much more.

So look for more to come on what is possible on the EC2 platform.

A Wearable Camcorder and Community Site for Publishing

Check this cool camera out. Itis a company of action sports enthusiasts and media professionals

It is perfect for the person who wants to document their active life.

Supposively the quality is pretty good. The camera can record 2 full hours of video on an embedded MicroSD card. There's also a microphone built-in.

Once the recording is complete, it can be uploaded to the VholdR site, tagged, labeled, and then shared.

What is also very cool is the application uses several Amazon Web Services behind the scenes. All of the videos are stored in Amazon S3, and the entire EC2-powered uploading, transcoding, and post-processing system is driven by data stored in a couple of Amazon SQS instances.

I'm going to have to test run one of these.

Perfect Example of Application Built on Top of Amazon Web Services

Sonian is about to launch their new data archive services dubbed the Sonian Archive SA2.

The server runs almost completely in the Amazon Cloud. It was designd to be a highly-scalable cloud application that specifically used four fo the Amazon Web Services:

• Amazon S3
• Amazon Ec2
• Simple Queue Service
• SimpleDB
  

Their goal of the application is to help mid-sized companies do a better job of archiving internally generated digital content for storage management and electronic discovery.

I would like to see a case study on this deployment, it looks to be a perfect deployment of web 2.0 application that full embraces Amazon Web Services.

GigaSpaces Infinitely-Scalable Application Platform

Was introduced to GigaSpaces today by a friend at the University of Oregon. What an amazing application platform. It truly an infinite scaling application that just doesn't handle the back-end tier, it tackles the business layer as well.

This is similar to the technology that Google and Amazon have built for themselves and their offerings.

They also have an GigaSpaces Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that is publicly available, and there is a white paper available for the GigaSpaces EC2 Machine Image.

Gigaspaces support for Java, .Net (C#), and C++. They are also working on a presentation layer that works with the likes of Flash / Flex, AJAX, and Microsoft Silverlight.

They are reworking their pricing right now, however their target audience is the small business and startups so it should be affordable. They also have a community version available of Gigaspaces.

I am going to do a little more homework here.

My Profile - Kin Lane - Amazon Web Services

Some of the work Amazon is doing right now I consider to be some of the most innovative and disruptive technology out there today. I would place it at the same level as the work google is doing and with Facebook's open platform. Very few developers I know even are aware of Amazon Web Services, when I mention it they think about the Amazon Store.

Here are the web services I am working with:

Amazon Simple Storage Service -Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Amazon SimpleDB - Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

Amazon EC2 -Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud. Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

Amazon Simple Queue Service - Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed application components performing different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available.

Amazon Associates Web Service - The Amazon Associates Web Service (formerly named the Amazon E-Commerce Service "ECS") exposes Amazon's product data through an easy-to-use web services interface that, when combined with the Amazon Associates Program, is a powerful combination for website owners, Web developers, and Amazon sellers to make money. Developers may use the Amazon Associates Web Service as long as it's used primarily to drive traffic back to Amazon's web sites or sales of Amazon products and services. The Amazon Associates Web Service makes it simple for developers to build rich and highly effective applications that merchandise Amazon products.

Amazon Flexible Payments Service - Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon's reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.

What Amazon offers here is pretty powerful stuff. I am working to integrate Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon S3 into all my web applications. I am still working with a proper integration of Amazon Simple Queue Service and Amazon EC2.