Amazon now provide pretty much have all the infrastructure that a web application might need – hosting, storage, database, message queuing. This stuff is utility SaaS in its rawest form. Nick Carr has a timely piece about what Google are up to in this space. (Update: Joe Gregorio, now of Google, has an interesting megadata view).

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.

The core future media concept is the Agav – an Agent-Avatar, which “finds information, people…

I love these videos, Lawrence Lessig (a future US Secretary of Justice) declares copyright illegal, Google buys Microsoft, Google buys everyone and so on. But it has some style so it is worth watching:

The concept of the avatar has been around for centuries, long before Ultima IV – man, that was a blast. This video extrapolates the concept nicely into derivatives of digital properties that most computer users should now be familiar with, now that social networking and MMORPGs are the prevelant forms of online communication.

The evolution of the prosumer will continue. I for one like being a prosumer – or maybe it’s just that I like knowing that I’m a prosumer. I’m not sure, best be aware of these things though…