Entries about Amazon Web Services:

• Using Amazon S3, EC2, Lucene and Ruby for Web Spidering
• Amazon S3 from the command line
• Amazon EC2: What You May Not Have Known
• SimpleJPA: Java Persistence API (JPA) implementation for Amazon’s SimpleDB
• ec2buntu: Google Group discussing about the use of Ubuntu on EC2 infrastructure
• Cloud Tools is a set of tools for deploying and testing Java EE applications on Amazon EC2

Entries about Amazon Web Services:

• Amazon S3 Copy Proposal: at last… This will allow to copy, rename, move, and relocate (from US to EU or the contrary) buckets without having to download/upload.
• Amazon FPS: How to create a Marketplace Application
• Amazon FPS: Pay Now Widget Module for OsCommerce
• Monetize your Amazon S3 objects using Amazon FPS
• Hadoop AMI and its associated tutorial Running Hadoop MapReduce on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3
• Taking Massive Distributed Computing to the Common Man - Hadoop on Amazon EC2/S3
• Hadoop on Demand: provisioning of Hadoop on a virtual cluster, but not EC2…

Entries about Amazon Web Services:

• FAQ for Amazon S3
• Scaling with Clouds
• Building a Multisourced Infrastructure Using OpenVPN: how to scale your applications on Amazon EC2 when your local data-center can’t handle peaks load.

O’Reilly should release a new book called Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB (Programming) in March 2008.

This book looks really promising. I’ll buy the book as soon as possible and will publish a review of it when done reading it.

Here is the book description:

Building on the success of its storefront and fulfillment services, Amazon now allows businesses to “rent” computing power, data storage and bandwidth on its vast network platform. This book demonstrates how developers working with small- to mid-sized companies can take advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as the Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Queue Service (SQS), Flexible Payments Service (FPS), and SimpleDB to build web-scale business applications.

With AWS, Amazon offers a new paradigm for IT infrastructure: use what you need, as you need it, and pay as you go. Programming Web Services explains how you can access Amazon’s open APIs to store and run applications, rather than spend precious time and resources building your own. With this book, you’ll learn all the technical details you need to:

• Store and retrieve any amount of data using application servers, unlimited data storage, and bandwidth with the Amazon S3 service
• Buy computing time using Amazon EC2’s interface to requisition machines, load them with an application environment, manage access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as needed
• Use Amazon’s web-scale messaging infrastructure to store messages as they travel between computers with Amazon SQS
• Leverage the Amazon FPS service to structure payment instructions and allow the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers
• Create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results using Amazon SimpleDB.
• Scale up or down at a moment’s notice, using these services to employ as much time and space as you need

Whether you’re starting a new online business, need to ramp up existing services, or require an offsite backup for your home, Programming Web Services gives you the background and the practical knowledge you need to start using AWS. Other books explain how to build web services. This book teaches businesses how to take make use of existing services from an established technology leader.

Update: the slides have been published!

Dennis Reedy and I have been selected as speakers for JavaOne 08.

Here is the abstract of our session called How can Amazon EC2 benefic from the Elastic Grid solution?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides a fantastic way to deploy scalable machine images, but what to do when you want an application to scale across the machine images you have provisioned? This session discusses the Elastic Grid, an approach that provides dynamic allocation, management, and scalability of applications, using Amazon EC2 as the backbone. It also introduces the open-source technologies Elastic Grid is based on: Rio and Apache River (Jini™ network technology).The Elastic Grid provides an architecture for developing, deploying, and managing distributed applications composed of services. Key to the architecture are a set of dynamic capabilities and reliance on policy-based and quality-of-service mechanisms. The Elastic Grid reduces the complexity surrounding the development of dynamic services by introducing Jini network technology remoting for POJOs as well as by providing a simple component model.

The Elastic Grid extends Amazon EC2’s virtual grid environment, enabling users to manage and dynamically scale Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) based on declarable SLAs, as well as deal with partial failure of AMI instances. Rio reduces the complexity surrounding the development of dynamic services by introducing dynamic Jini network technology remoting for POJOs, as well as providing a simple component model.

The presentation demonstrates how IntelliJ plug-ins for Amazon EC2 and Rio ease building and deploying a sample application distributed over the Amazon EC2 grid. With the Elastic Grid solution, the application will scale on the Amazon EC2 grid by starting and stopping Amazon EC2 instances accordingly to declared SLAs (service-level agreements).

We hope to see you there!

Today, we have been able to use a custom AMI in order to run Rio on many Amazon EC2 instances.

The test we did was quite simple: one instance of our Amazon image (let’s call it server1) ran Rio (rio start all), whereas another instance (let’s call it server2) ran CLI (Rio command-line interface). Multicast being disabled between Amazon EC2 instances, we had to use a Unicast lookup. This can be done in CLI with the following command:
set locators jini://PRIVATE_DNS_NAME_OF_RIO_SERVER_1

We were able to list from server2 the services running on server1. CLI uses the default ServiceDiscoveryManager settings, so when we stop Rio on server1, we had to wait 10 minutes before the services disappeared.

So, do not forget to customize your Rio/Jini environment when using Amazon EC2.

We will soon provide a public AMI, with a customized Rio distribution tuned for Amazon EC2.

Update: there is now a tutorial for running Rio on Amazon EC2 and Rio AMI!