Update: 7 days later, Werner Vogels announces a European S3 datacenter. - no mention of EC2 though

Mike Culver gave an interesting briefing and demo of some AWS technologies yesterday in the Digital Exchange in Dublin. Quick summary from my notes:

General

  • No European data centers at the moment (see Justin’s comment)

EC2

  • Now have several flavours - Small (10c/hr=$70/month), Medium (40c/hr=$280/month), Large (80c/hr=$560/month) if left running for the whole month.

  • All the official Amazon Machine Images (ec2-public-images*) are still Fedora 4 based. This is a relatively old linux distro but is rock solid. Lots of unofficial images though I suspect building your own from a stock distro is probably the way to go

  • There is market for ‘Paid AMIs’ where 3rd parties sell images and earn a commission based on total instance uptime from Amazon. Interesting market!

  • Mentioned Elastic Live and RightScale as providers who offer a degree of support for managing EC2 instances (Amazon don’t offer much by way of support for EC2)

  • He ran through creating a AWS image and starting it up using some Java based command line tools (wrapper for their HTTP APIs), nothing earth shattering here.

SQS

  • Only a very high level overview, the only technical note of interest is that SQS cannot be treated as a FIFO queue - messages not deleted will re-appear.

FPS

  • US only, no indication that would change
  • Interesting rules scripts support for controlling payments
  • Option to charge fees to either end of the transaction (as opposed to credit card companies who always charge merchant)
  • Micropayment (to as little as 1c) support via commission % fee model.

S3

  • From 800 million objects in Aug ‘06 to 10 billion objects in Aug ‘07, no details on average object size.
  • Does not automatically set HTTP cache control headers (Last-Modified, Etag etc) on objects when serving them over HTTP so that they won’t be cached by internet caches (or browsers) - bit naff! Suggested this might be achievable via object metadata though I havn’t checked this yet.
  • No support for rename or symlink type operations. They mentioned that JungleDisk acheive this by using EC2 instances to do the rename via copy/delete - traffic between EC2 and S3 is free.
  • No indication of support for OAuth to support delegated authority. Shame.