Notes from Mike Culver @ Digital Exchange

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

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.

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.

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 amazon, dublin, web services

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).

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More updates...