Cloud Hosting

Guys I'm struggling to get to grips with AWS... I need to upload a J2EE application but not sure where to go or how to do it under AWS. Give me a regular and I'll do it no problem, but not in the cloud. Any help appreciated.

Unless you've been on the moon you can't have missed the hype around Cloud computing and particularly the biggest name associated with it. Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows you to utilise Amazons massive server infrastructure without having to consider set up costs, hardware failures, network scalability or redundant hardware.

Amazon's EC2 service experienced an outage at 6:39 Pacific Time on Wednesday apparently due to a lightning storm which caused damage to a power distribution unit. By 11:10pm, Amazon stated that "Most instances have full recovered" and at 1:20am on Thursday Amazon said the problem had been fully resolved.

Amazon stated that only "a very small percentage of instances" were affected and that it was not a "generalized service issue".

Amazon is now hosting all United States TIGER Census data in its cloud.

This data set is a complete set of Census 2000 and Current shapefiles for American states, counties, subdivisions, districts, places, and areas. The data is available as shapefiles suitable for use in GIS, along with their associated metadata. The official source of this data is the US Census Bureau, Geography Division.

Billing Overview

Billed on a monthly basis for resources consumed. There are two pricing models:

1) 'On Demand Instances' let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. However, the hourly rate for resource useage is higher than the alternative.
2)'Reserved Instances' give you the option to make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance.

Cost

On-Demand Instances - Standard CPU usage
Small: $0.10 / hour (Linux), $0.125 / hour (Windows)
Large: $0.40 / hour (Linux), $0.50 / hour (Windows)
Extra Large: $0.80 / hour (Linux), $1.00 / hour (Windows)

On-Demand Instances - High CPU Usage
Medium: $0.20 / hour (Linux), $0.30 / hour (Windows)
Extra Large: $0.80 / hour (Linux), $1.20 / hour (Windows)

Reserved Instances - Standard CPU usage
Small: 1 yr term - $325, 3 year term - $500, usage - $0.03 / hour
Large: 1 yr term - $1300, 3 year term - $2000, usage - $0.12 / hour
Extra Large: 1 yr term - $2600, 3 year term - $4000, usage - $0.24 / hour

Reserved Instances - High CPU usage
Medium: 1 yr term - $650, 3 year term - $1000, usage - $0.06 / hour
Extra Large: 1 yr term - $2600, 3 year term - $4000, usage - $0.24 / hour

Go to Amazon's Online Calculator

Network / Hardware and Virtualisation platform

Infrastructure - Runs on Amazon.com's infrastructure. No further details available.

Virtualisation Platform - Xen

Scalability - No limit

Load-Balancing - Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances

Supported OS - Linux

Hosting Features

DNS - Rather than waiting on a data technician to reconfigure or replace your host, or waiting for DNS to propagate to all of your customers, Amazon EC2 enables you to engineer around problems with your instance or software by quickly remapping your Elastic IP address to a replacement instance.

Email - No

IP Addresses - 5 elastic IP addresses included

Extra Applications

Amazon CloudWatch, Service Health Dashboard

SLA

Yes - AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to make Amazon EC2 available with an Annual Uptime Percentage (defined below) of at least 99.95% during the Service Year.

Support and Community

Forums, dashboard monitoring, resource center and FAQ. No ticket support thought unless you upgrade to AWS premium support (either silver or gold)

Online community consists of developer forums, user gropus and the Amazon Web Services blog

Media

Gettins started with Amazon S3: This video shows you how to upload and stream files from your Amazon S3 storage - a useful watch if you are unsure what to expect from cloud storage.

Following on from my previous iPhone application which allows you to monitor the status of various cloud computing backend services, and continuing with the Cloud Computing themed applications. I'd like to announce the release of my next iPhone application onto the App Store...

• aallan's blog
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Paul Graham, one of my favourite dispensers of wisdom, argues that the arrival of web based software has changed not just the user experience, but the developer experience as well.

One of the most important changes in this new world is the way you do releases. In the desktop software business, doing a release is a huge trauma, in which the whole company sweats and strains to push out a single, giant piece of code. Obvious comparisons suggest themselves, both to the process and the resulting product. - "The Other Road Ahead", Paul Graham

Which is exactly right. Working in the cloud you rarely make a software release in the old sense of the word. Despite the benefits I must admit I actually somewhat miss the "big push" where, usually with a great deal of trepidation, you roll out a new improved version of a piece of software.

So it's was with a certain sense of nostalgia, about the days before web applications started killing off the desktop, that a just a couple of months ago I announced the release of my first iPhone application onto the App Store...