AWS News Blog
Link Roundup for Monday, October 22, 2007
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My inbox is overflowing with material for the blog! Here’s what I have:
The web-based Bungee Connect development environment now includes support for the Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS). Using the new library (which you can read about here), it is easy to create, sign, and issue your FPS requests. You may want to read the entire post to learn how Brad used the REST interface to FPS while still taking advantage of the data types described in the FPS WSDL file.
Speaking of Bungee Labs (or more properly speaking to them), Alex Barnett and Ted Haeger of Bungee interviewed me last week as part of their podcast series. You can listen to the first part of the interview here. We talked for about an hour; the second part should be ready soon.
Paul Allen, founder of World Vital Records, is a big fan of Amazon EC2. His recently launched Related on Facebook application has attracted tens of thousands of users in its first couple days of operation. They are in the process of putting their fully scalable architecture into place. Paul notes that this will allow him to grow the business to incredible size without the need to make a major investment in servers:
Back in 1999 we had to invest millions of dollars in servers in order to handle the load. Today we are working on switching from our single beefy server to a cloud of servers on Amazons EC2 web service, giving us virtually infinite scalability with no cap ex expense.
Amazon Vice President Adam Selipsky was a speaker at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. As part of his talk, Adam unveiled the newest statistics on usage of Amazon S3 usage. Our 265,000-strong developer community has now stored over 10 billion (10,000,000,000) objects in S3 at a rate of 27,601 transactions per second. That’s a lot of data and a lot of transactions!
A week or two before my most recent trip to Europe, I received a blog comment from Manoj Ranaweera, CEO of edocr.com. In a subsequent email conversation, Manoj invited me to spend a day of my trip in a city called Daresbury, and promised that it would be worth my while. I took a train ride to Daresbury and Manoj drove me to the Daresbury Innovation Centre, where I was happy to give an AWS presentation to the OpenCoffee Liverpool meetup and to meet with several startups, some of them already using one or more of our services. That’s Manoj to my right in the picture.
Manoj and I met privately and I was able to learn all about edocr. Powered by EC2 and S3, edocr simplifies and centralizes the process of putting business documents of all sorts online. Business can store and tag product literature, product updates, case studies, white papers, and newsletters in edocr. The site will generate a thumbnail for each document and it will also collect ratings, comments, and viewing statistics. Documents can be viewed within the site or downloaded for offline use. It is also easy to embed the documents in your own site or to link to the master copy on edocr.
While I was in Daresbury I also met with Mike Carter and Chris Haslam of Ixis. Ixis has built Football FanCast, an S3-powered site for UK football fans. The site includes blogs, podcasts, and forums for each team. Using S3, they are able to deal with traffic surges and to offer media downloads that would otherwise require a lot of storage, bandwidth, and other server infrastructure.
Paul Bissett of WeoGeo dropped me a note to make sure that I knew that their WeoCEO product is now available for public beta testing. The newest version includes enhancements to the product’s stable IP address management feature, failure detection, and automatic scaling and load balancing. You can read more in Paul’s recent blog post.
That’s about all I have time for today. If this doesn’t satiate your appetite for Amazon Web Services new, you may want to check out the AWS Buzz on del.icio.us. As I write this there are almost 1300 articles tagged.
— Jeff;