Notes from Mike Culver @ Digital Exchange
October 31st, 2007
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.
Just a follow up on one of your S3 points – S3 actually does set the Last-Modified and Etag fields automatically.
It does not set a cache-control header, but you can set that at file upload time in the headers (you can’t change without re-uploading though).