Amazon Launches New Web Service for Fulfillment

Amazon added another layer to their stack of web services to. They added the Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS) which allows merchants to tap in to Amazon’s network of fulfillment centers and logistics. Merchants can store their own products to our fulfillment centers and then, using a web service interface, fulfill orders for the products and ship a product to a customer.

There are two sets of APIS – Inbound and Outbound.

The Inbound service gives merchants the ability to create and send shipments to an Amazon fulfillment center from your vendors.

The Outbound service gives merchants the ability to ship products from Amazon FCs to their customers. This service revolves around the concept of a fulfillment order. The order contains a destination address, a shipping speed, and a list of item/quantity pairs to be shipped. The createFulfillmentOrder function is used to initiate the shipping process.

They are moving forward in basically offering a wholesale version of everything the do in-house.

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.

Amazon Web Services Experienced an Outage

Amazon Web Services experienced an outage this morning across all their systems. There is a flurry of posts on this forum about the Amazon Web Services Outage.

This is the first actual outage I have seen or heard of on the Amazon Web Services Platform. Definitely a black eye for Amazon Web Services and building credibility with the community to use them as the core of their networks.

Gives some fuel to the argument that no matter what infrastructure you use that you should have a Plan B.

There were some really scared and frustrated people out there questioning their business models.

I really hope Amazon can recover from this, I really have been pushing AWS and evangelizing with various clients.

Amazon Launchs new S3 Analysis Tool

Amazon just launched a new analysis tool for Amazon S3 called, S3Stat. This tool uses the log files generated by S3, analyzes them using Webalizer, and generates a variety of reports.

Take a look at the sample reports to learn more.

There's a one-month free trial and usage after that costs just $2 per month. Take a look at the pricing plan to learn more. While you are on the site you may want to take a look at their list of S3 resources as well.

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.

Using Amazon Web Services for Facebook Applications

Not everyone knows you can about the Amazon Web Services Platform let alone that you can use it to create highly scalable applications for Facebook.

Amazon Web Services is an ideal hosting environment for these applications. Developers can start small, test and prove out their ideas, and then rapidly add processing and storage resources as they develop an audience.

Amazon is talking about building Facebook Applications on AWS and you can visit a new page on Building Facebook Applications on the Amazon Web Services Platform, you can find step-by-step instructions for registration along with links to tutorials, and even a pre-built EC2 AMI.

Nice to see them working to promote and educate people on how to use the AWS Platform to inexpensively build highly scalable Facebook applications.

Amazon Digital Content Platform

I was reading through my blogs today and came across the post from Download Squad on Amazon Launches Software Downloads.

I dug around a little more and saw where you can manager your Media Library on Amazon including E-Docs, Amazon Shorts, Unbox Videos, Kindle Books, Kindle Newspapers, Kindle Blogs, Kindle Blogs, Amazon Mp3 and Software Downloads.

Found it interesting that they give you an area to manage all of your digital material that you purchase through Amazon as a customer.

Then I thought well there must be a flip side to this service and logged into my Amazon Web Services account and foudn I could sign up for the Amazon Digital Text Platform. This allows me as a publisher to publish my digital text content. It talks like it is exclusively for E-Books and for Kindle, however beyond the surface it looks like you could manage all your digital content here and post for sale on Amazon.

I will play around with more and see what comes of it. I am interested in publishing some of my micro / mini books here on various technology and marketing topics. Let you guys know how it goes.

Increasing Amazon S3 Data Transfer Performance

The Amazon S3 team is now beta-testing support for an important low-level networking feature which has the potential to significantly increase the performance of large data transfers to and from S3, particularly for long distance data transfers.

Per the thread in the Amazon S3 Forum, early results from the beta testers are quite good with reported speedups of 4x to 18x! If you are moving large amounts of data into or out of S3 then you will definitely want to implement this feature.

For me the Amazon S3 performance has be acceptable for 90% of my projects, however I have had a few clients who chose not to use the service when they complained about performance speeds during prototyping.

Eager to see what the Amazon Team comes up wtih.

Amazon Web Services - Simple DB

So I jumped the gun and blogged about the new Amazon DevPay web service and realized I hadn't even mentioned the other latest release from Amazon, the SimpleDB.

This is something I have been waiting for. I was already utilizing Amazon S3 for heavy storage of files, images, and large text blobs. I use MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server for most back-end databases, however 90% of the time I am using only about 10% of the capabilities available to me.

I am looking to add, update, and delete text and numeric data is very small amounts most of the time.

SimpleDB is perfect for this type of small to medium size web site and application deployment.

I am excited about playing around with it more and see if it can become the perfect scalable database platform that I have been looking for.

Another Sweet Amazon Web Services - DevPay

Amazon just added another quality web service to their killer lineup. They released Amazon DevPay in Limited Beta, which is a simple-to-use billing and account service that assists developers in getting paid for applications they build using Amazon Web Services.

Its a layer built on their Flexible Payment Services and allows me to integrate it into applications I build and allows me to create and manage the billing system for the application.

I allows me to take advantage of various payment setups such as recurring and usage-based pricing models.

Interesting addition....I still haven't completely grasped how SimpleDB is going to be worked into my architecture. Lots to do!

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.