Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

How I love Amazon AWS. In October there were already hints about Static IPs and now they are here. Check out the Amazon Web Services Blog post about all of the new stuff.

First of all, we now have what they call Elastic IP Addresses and the system is very cool. You get up to 5 IPs to start with. You get one via an API call to AllocateAddress, which allocates you one fixed IP that then belongs to you. Without you using it you pay 1 cent per hour. But you can then do an AssociateAddress and it is attached to a Server and becomes free, meaning you no longer pay for its usage. You can then DisassociateAddress and ReleaseAddress if you do not plan to use it at all.

Then couple that with Availability Zones, which are zones in their Network Infrastructure that are insulated from each other so that if one zone goes down, another does not (in theory, there might always be odd cases, chance if you want ;)).

This really means you can do more for a high availability solution with Amazon AWS and if they now start a NOC in Germany, I will possibly never do my own Server again. But they are not here yet so we are just using it for parts of our system, and I am taking a look at Globalways.

But again, congratulations to the entire Team behind Amazon EC2 for pulling this one of. Thank you. No more DynDNS for our Ad Server

Lots of great news from the Amazon AWS team. First of all there is now an SLA for their service. This in itself is very cool indeed, not because I don’t trust their uptime and their will to be up and running, but it just ads a little bit of accountability to the mix. 99.9% uptime is roughly an hour of downtime per year by the way. Not bad.

The one that excited me even more, and I am happy to quiz one of their evangelists when he comes over to cologne next month, is from an eWeek article:

Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, told the audience that the offering was currently working on static IP technology.

Wow! Kick ass. I just really need one, and a way to manage which server gets that IP. Sure I could use some dyndns like service, or even Neustar Ultra Services or something but having one unique IP that is up and that can be bound to a load balancer would be great. Add WeoCeo and I am set.

Damn they are good! Amazon has done a pricing upgrade to their S3 System. The new prices are effective for June 1st of this year and they probably found out how some people use S3. I have been raving about the system for some time already and so it is no wonder that we are using it at Ormigo.

As we are running large advertising campaigns around products that are interesting for local service providers, we need our ads solution to be both flexible and very scalable. Running ads on big portals means that your system needs to work. Previously I had worked together with Akamai, whom I still like very much, but they are rather expensive and some hits still come down to your servers. Above that it only really works well if you have a relatively high caching time.

Amazon S3 is a very cool middle thing in that it allows us to upload our ads to their system and not have any impact on our servers. Through the API we can automatically update the ads whenever we want. Additional flexibility will come when we lean more on EC2 as additional help, but we will see how this goes. For now I am very happy with what we have as a first step. And sure, S3 can go down, but you know what… so can our servers. At this time I am reasonably sure that S3 has more resources available to keep the servers up than we do.

How does the pricing change effect us though. Simple. Above the bandwidth charges they are adding per request charges, which is a logical thing. For us this will possibly add up to a bit more costs as ads are relatively small and mostly text based. Bandwidth prices for uploads are cut in half, and bandwidth prices for download are decreased a little bit dependent on volume you take.

Above that PUT and LIST requests will be $0.01 CPM and GET requests are $0.001 CPM. That is really ok I have to say and I actually like the system, which makes it more transparent and easier for Amazon to calculate profitably. Looking forward to seeing the next bill.

What is the Amazon Monitoring Service? I am confused. I have it as a report in my interface but that’s it. Service is unavailable it says when I try to generate a report, and it is nowhere to be selected.

Does anyone out there have something like this?

Damn, my first Amazon WebService Billing Statement, for S3, just arrived. After moving over well over a gig of images into a bucket that I later deleted, I am now being billed $0.48. I will seriously have to think a bit further on what I do with that and create some bandwidth guzzling to warrant the 3 lines on the VISA statement

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