Aws

As you’ve probably heard, Amazon Web Services reduced their on-demand cloud prices significantly last week. You’d think customers would be happy across the board, but that’s not the case. Here’s why, and what will happen as a result. As discussed previously, AWS customers translate their capacity planning into Reserved Instance purchases, based on the relative savings these RIs provide over on-demand prices. But, when on-demand prices are reduced without a corresponding reduction in the instance-hour price for RIs - as happened last week - the RI breakeven point shifts and upsets the optimal RI coverage calculus. AWS customers who purchased RIs before the price reduction can find themselves stuck with inventory that now costs more per hour, in amortized terms, than the cost if they had not purchased the RI. I have several clients in this situation, and none are very happy about it. ...

Last week both Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services reduced their prices for cloud computing services significantly to comparable levels, and both now offer significant discounts for long-term usage. Yet, though the two cloud services may seem similar, their radically different long-term pricing models reveal just how different these cloud offerings really are. Whose responsibility is capacity planning? The core difference between GCP and AWS is in capacity planning: Whose responsibility is it? In AWS, the customer owns their own capacity planning. If the customer can accurately predict their needs for the long term, they can purchase Reserved Instances and save significantly as compared to the on-demand cost. Whereas in GCE, Google owns the capacity planning. GCE customers are granted a Sustained Use discount at the end of the month for resources that were active for a significant portion of the month. The GCE customer might track their expected vs. actual costs and be pleasantly surprised when their bill at the end of the month is lower than expected, but the GCE customer cannot a priori translate their capacity planning prowess into reduced costs. ...

We used to go through so much trouble to manipulate Amazon Web Services resources from the command-line. There were separate AWS command-line tools for each service, and each needed to be downloaded and had unique configuration, and each had its own unique output format. Eric Hammond wrote in detail about this. With the new awscli tool by Mitch Garnaat (of python boto fame) and his team at AWS, we have a single tool that does it all, uniformly, and can be simply configured. Thanks, Amazon! ...

Ancient wisdom apparently has much to offer modern cloud application architects. This fragment was discovered in a shadowy basement in the Tel Aviv area of Israel. See a PDF of the fragment This finding clearly shows that ancient cloud application architects in the great talmudic academies of Babylon struggled with the transition away from classic databases. At the time, apparently, a widely used solution was known as Urim veTumim (“oracle”). Yet this database was unsuited for reliable use in cloud applications, and the text explores the reasons behind that unsuitability. ...

As of Februrary 2011 AWS S3 has been able to serve static websites, giving you superior availability for unchanging (or seldom-changing) content. But most websites today are not static; dynamic elements drive essential features such as personalized pages, targeted advertisements, and shopping carts. Today’s release from AWS CloudFront: Support for Dynamic Content alleviates some of the challenge of running dynamic websites. You can now configure a custom set of URL patterns to always be passed through to the origin server. This allows you to “poke holes” in the CDN cache for providing dynamic content. ...

Reading AWS’s recent announcement of the AWS Marketplace you would think that it provides a catalog of click-to-deploy, highly-available, scalable applications running on EC2. You’d be partially right: the applications available in the AWS Marketplace are deployable in only a few clicks. But highly-available and scalable services will be difficult to build using Marketplace images. Here’s why. Essential Ingredients of HA and Scalability on AWS AWS makes it easy to run scalable, HA applications via several features. Not all applications use all of these features, but it would be very difficult to provide scalable and highly available service without using at least one of these: ...

How much time is “wasted” in the paid-for but unused portion of the hour when you terminate an instance? How can you recapture this time - which represents compute power - and put it to good use? After all, you’ve paid for it already. This article presents a technique for repurposing an instance after you’re “done” with it, until the current billing hour is up. It’s inspired by a tweet from DEVOPS_BORAT: ...

Update May 2011: Now that AWS Route 53 can be used to allow an ELB to host a domain zone apex, the technique described here is no longer necessary. Cool, but not necessary. Someone really has to implement this. I’ve had this draft sitting around ever since AWS announced support for improved CloudWatch alerts and AutoScaling policies (August 2010), but I haven’t yet turned it into a clear set of commands to follow. If you do, please comment. ...

The title pretty much says it all. Elastic Beanstalk is the new service from Amazon Web Services offering you easier deployment of Java WAR files. More languages and platforms are expected to be supported in the future. Most people will use the service via the convenient web console, but if you want to automate things you’ll either end up using the command-line tools (CLI tools) or the API in the Java SDK (until their other SDKs add Beanstalk support). ...

This article is a guest post by Guy Rosen, CEO of Onavo and author of the Jack of All Clouds blog. Guy was one of the first people to produce hard numbers on cloud adoption for site hosting, and he continues to publish regular updates to this research in his State of the Cloud series. These days he runs his startup Onavo which uses the cloud to offer smartphone users a way to slash overpriced data roaming costs. In this article, Guy provides another technique to track changes to your dynamic cloud services automatically, possible now that AWS has released Route 53, DNS services. Take it away, Guy. ...