All Things Distributed

In the past three and a half years, Amazon CloudFront has changed the content delivery landscape. It has demonstrated that a CDN does not have to be complex to use with expensive contracts, minimum commits, or upfront fees, such that you are forcibly locked into a single vendor for a long time. CloudFront is simple, fast and reliable with the usual pay-as-you-go model. With just one click you can enable content to be distributed to the customer with low latency and high-reliability.

Today Amazon CloudFront has taken another major step forward in ease of use. It now supports delivery of entire websites containing both static objects and dynamic content. With these features CloudFront makes it as simple as possible for customers to use CloudFront to speed up delivery of their entire dynamic website running in Amazon EC2/ELB (or third-party origins), without needing to worry about which URLs should point to CloudFront and which ones should go directly to the origin.

Dynamic Content Support

Recall that last month the CloudFront team announced lowering the minTTL customers can set on their objects, down to as low as 0 seconds to support delivery of dynamic content. In addition to the TTLs, customers also need some other features to deliver dynamic websites through CloudFront. The first set of features that CloudFront is launching today include:

Multiple Origin Servers: the ability to specify multiple origin servers, including a default origin, for a CloudFront download distribution. This is useful when customers want to use different origin servers for different types of content. For example, an Amazon S3 bucket can be used as the origin for static objects and an Amazon EC2 instance as the origin for dynamic content, all fronted by the same CloudFront distribution domain name. Of course non-AWS origins are also permitted.

Query String based Caching: the ability to include query string parameters as part of the object's cache key. Customers will have a switch to turn query strings 'on' or 'off'. When turned off, CloudFront's behavior will be the same as today - i.e., CloudFront will not pass the query string to the origin server nor include query string parameters as a part of the object's cache key. And when query strings are turned on, CloudFront will pass the full URL (including the query string) to the origin server and also use the full URL to uniquely identify an object in the cache.

URL based configuration: the ability to configure cache behaviors based on URL path patterns. Each URL path pattern will include a set of cache behaviors associated with it. These cache behaviors include the target origin, a switch for query strings to be on/off, a list of trusted signers for private content, the viewer protocol policy, and the minTTL that CloudFront should apply for that URL path pattern. See the graphic at the end of this post for an example configuration.

More new features

In addition to these features, there are other things the CloudFront team has achieved to speed up delivery of content, but all customer will get these benefits by default without additional configuration. These performance optimizations are available for all types of content (static and dynamic) delivered via CloudFront. Specifically:

Optimal TCP Windows. The TCP initcwnd has been increased for all CloudFront hosts to maximize the available bandwidth between the edge and the viewer. This is in addition to the existing optimizations of routing viewers to the edge location with lowest latency for that user, and also persistent connections with the clients.

Persistent Connection to Origins. Connections are improved from CloudFront edge locations to the origins by maintaining long-lived persistent connections. This helps by reducing the connection set-up time from the edge to the origin for each new viewer. When the viewer is far away from the origin, this is even more helpful in minimizing total latency between the viewer and the origin.

Selecting the best AWS region for Origin Fetch. When customers run their origins in AWS, we expect that our network paths from each CloudFront edge to the various AWS Regions will perform better with less packet loss given that we monitor and optimize these network paths for availability and performance. In addition, we have shown an optional configuration in the architecture diagram how developers can use Route 53’s LBR (Latency Based Routing) to run their origin servers in different AWS Regions. Each CloudFront edge location will then go to the “best” AWS Region for the origin fetch. And Route 53 already understands very well which CloudFront host is in which edge location (this is integration we’ve built between the two services). This helps improve performance even further.

Amazon CloudFront is expanding it functionality and feature set at an incredible pace. I am particularly excited about these features that help customers deliver both static and dynamic content through one distribution. CloudFront stays true to its mission in making a Content Delivery Network dead simple to use, and now they also do this for dynamic content.

For more details, see the CloudFront detail page and the posting on the AWS developer blog.

Invention comes in many forms and at many scales. The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower others to unleash their creativity – to pursue their dreams.

Hundreds of thousands of businesses in over 190 countries are relying on AWS to support some or all of their business and IT needs. From SAP and Oracle production installations to risk management HPC, from Internet banking to protein folding, from social gaming to mobile collaboration tools, from video distribution to hotel reservations systems, supply chain management and medical archiving, the list of what our customers achieve using the AWS cloud is fascinating. Many of our customers will tell you that although the cost savings that AWS brings them are important, more important is that they are able to be more agile, that they are able to move faster in a world with murderous competition and highly compressed time-to-markets. They will tell you that because of the new resource models they are able to reinvent the way they are doing business and have entered into a new world where they are no longer constrained by access to resources and can focus their best people on adding value to the customer instead of managing infrastructure.

We want to help businesses to continue to reinvent themselves by sharing our experiences, sharing our great customer and partner’s stories, and to present our vision for the future. AWS re: Invent is our inaugural global customer and partner conference that will be held November 27-29 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Well over 100 sessions from deep technical workshops to strategy sessions for executives, there will high quality content for everyone. And enough food for thought for everyone about how to continue to reinvent...

Save the date, and watch this page for more details.

The software that powers today’s world of Internet services has become incredibly diverse. Today’s announcement of Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL Server and .NET support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk marks another important step in our commitment to increase the flexibility for AWS customers to use the choice of operating system, programming language, development tools and database software that meet their application requirements.

Using the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio, you can now deploy your .NET applications to AWS Elastic Beanstalk directly from your Visual Studio environment without changing any code. You can then off load the management and scaling of your database and application stack to Amazon RDS and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and focus on adding value to your customers.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server

Managing databases has been a stumbling block for many of our customers, shifting their time away from developing innovative applications to the “muck” of administrative tasks such as OS and database software patching, storage management, and implementing reliable backup and disaster recovery solutions. Amazon RDS manages all these time consuming database administration tasks including patch management, striping the storage for better performance, and database and log backups for disaster recovery, enabling developers to focus more on their applications.

Since we launched Amazon RDS for MySQL in October 2009, it has become one of the most popular services on AWS, with customers such as Intuit using the service to keep up with the steep increase in traffic during the tax season. We introduced Amazon RDS for Oracle last year, and based on the demand from our Windows customers, are introducing Amazon RDS for SQL Server today. Amazon RDS currently supports SQL Server 2008 R2 and plans to add support for SQL Server 2012 later this year.

Depending on your requirements, you can choose from four different SQL Server Editions: Express, Web, Standard and Enterprise to run on Amazon RDS. If you are a new Amazon RDS customer, you can get started with Amazon RDS for SQL Server with a Free Usage Tier, which includes 750 hours per month of Amazon RDS micro instances with SQL Server Express Edition, 20GB of database storage and 10 million I/O requests per month.

After the Free Usage Tier, you can run Amazon RDS for SQL Server under two different licensing models - "License Included" and Microsoft License Mobility. Under the License Included service model, you do not need to purchase SQL Server software licenses. “License Included” pricing starts at $0.035/hour and is inclusive of SQL Server software, hardware, and Amazon RDS management capabilities. The Microsoft License Mobility program allows customers who already own SQL Server licenses to run SQL Server deployments on Amazon RDS. This benefit is available to Microsoft Volume Licensing customers with SQL Server licenses covered by active Microsoft Software Assurance contracts. The Microsoft License Mobility program is suited for customers who prefer to use existing SQL Server licenses or purchase new licenses directly from Microsoft.

.NET support for Elastic Beanstalk

In our effort to let a thousand platforms bloom on AWS, I am excited to introduce .NET support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Elastic Beanstalk gives developers an easy way to quickly build and manage their Java, PHP and as of today, their .NET applications in the AWS cloud. As discussed here, Elastic Beanstalk targets both application developers by providing a simple set of tools to get started with development quickly and the platform developers by giving control over the underlying technology stack. Developers simply upload their application and Elastic Beanstalk automatically creates the AWS resources and application stack needed to run the application, freeing developers from worrying about server capacity, load balancing, scaling their application, and version control.

Using the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio, developers can now deploy their .NET applications directly to Elastic Beanstalk, without leaving their development environment. The incremental deployment capabilities allow for quick development and testing cycles by only uploading modified files. Within seconds, new application versions get updated on a set of Amazon EC2 instances.

To get started with Amazon RDS for SQL Server and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, visit http://aws.amazon.com/rds/sqlserver and http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk. For a hands-on demo on how to deploy .NET applications on Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon RDS for SQL Server, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

Over the past several years I’ve spent much of my time traveling around the world speaking about distributed systems. From building infinitely scalable data stores, architectures for high performance computing, to the challenges imposed by the CAP theorem, there are wonderful, complex, fascinating problems to be solved in the area of distributed computing. During my travels I’ve met thousands of brilliant engineers who are leveraging the cloud to deliver exciting new products and revolutionize IT as we know it. One thing that’s become obvious to me is that there are innovative, inspiring developers in every corner of the planet from Australia to Iceland and from Israel to Peru.

And that leads me to another distributed problem – finding good engineers to help AWS build the next generation of cloud computing services. We’ve got a big vision and to realize it we need to find qualified engineers to join us on our journey. A quick look at the AWS career web sites reveals that we are hiring hundreds of people around the world.

Click here for our current job openings in the U.S.

Click here for our current job openings in Europe, Asia, and South Africa

Distributed problems call for innovative solutions. So next month we will be taking a distributed approach to finding engineers who want to join AWS. On May 17th and 18th we will be traveling to Houston, Minneapolis, and Nashville to interview candidates who want to join the AWS team. If you live in or near one of those cities and are interested in a meeting with us about careers in AWS check out this page. You can also simply email your resume to aws-recruiting@amazon.com

Today Amazon Web Services launched AWS Marketplace, an online store that makes it easy for you to find, buy, and immediately start using software and services that run on the AWS Cloud. You can use AWS Marketplace’s 1-Click deployment to quickly launch pre-configured software on your own Amazon EC2 instances and pay only for what you use, by the hour or month. AWS handles billing and payments, and software charges appear on your AWS bill.

Marketplace has software listings from well-known vendors including 10gen, CA, Canonical, Couchbase, Check Point Software, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Zend, and others, as well as many widely used open source offerings including Wordpress, Drupal, and MediaWiki.

AWS Marketplace brings the same simple and trusted online shopping experience that customers enjoy on Amazon.com to software built for the AWS platform, streamlining the process of doing research and purchasing software. It features a wide selection of development and business software, including software infrastructure, developer tools, and business applications. Product prices are clearly stated and appear on the same bill as your other AWS services.

AWS Marketplace also simplifies many of the challenges software companies face, such as acquiring customers, developing distribution channels, and billing for their software.

Why shop here?

The way businesses are buying applications is changing. There is a new generation of leaders that have very different expectations about how they can select the products and tools they need to be successful. Last week I met with a CIO for a discussion about how her IT department can use AWS to help make their business units be more agile and move faster. One of the stumbling blocks she mentioned was how to select the best software running on AWS, in a way that was completely in line with the “Cloud Experience”: no software to install, no sales cycle, no procurement delays, and a selection of licensing models to choose from. She jokingly asked for an “Amazon 1-Click” experience for software. I am sure she will be a very happy CIO today.

AWS Marketplace features a wide selection of commercial and free IT and business software. AWS Marketplace enables you to compare options, read reviews, and quickly find the software you want.

We wanted to shrink the time between finding what you want and getting it up and running. Once you find software you like, you can deploy that software to your own EC2 instance with 1-Click -- like the CIO suggested -- or using popular management tools like the AWS Console.

In addition, for most products, software prices are clearly posted on the website so you can purchase software immediately, with the payment instrument you already have on file with Amazon Web Services. Software charges appear on the same monthly bill as your AWS infrastructure charges.

Why sell here?

The Amazon Web Services have helped to create great ecosystem of ISVs that are selling software and services to other customers running in the cloud. It has had a true democratization effect: no longer does the dominant vendor in a market automatically get chosen. I have many IT decision makers ask me who are the young and exciting companies they should be paying attention to. Who are the companies that have a native cloud product, who are the ones that have innovative new licensing models, who are the young and hungry companies that break with the old style of enterprise software vending and are truly customer-centric. At the same time the up-and-coming companies often ask me how we can help them get in front of more customers such that they can compete in an open and honest way. And they also often ask whether we can help them with what Amazon.com does so well for its sellers: handle billing and charging.

AWS Marketplace includes both large, well known companies as well as exciting up and coming companies. If you’re a software provider with an offering that runs on the AWS cloud, you can gain new customers, enable usage-based billing without much additional work, and ensure that customers have a fast and easy deployment experience with their software.

AWS Marketplace helps software and SaaS providers find new customers by exposing their products to some of the hundreds of thousands of AWS customers, ranging from individual software developers to large enterprises.

Additionally, if you are interested in adding hourly billing to your software, AWS Marketplace can help. Simply upload an Amazon Machine Image to AWS and provide the hourly cost. Billing is managed by AWS Marketplace, relieving sellers of the responsibility of metering usage, managing customer accounts, and processing payments, leaving software developers more time to focus on building great software.

Summary

At Amazon we have a long experience with buyers and sellers in a marketplace. We know that something great happens when you solve problems for both the people selling things and those buying things – the market becomes more and more vibrant. We know that for buyers it is important to have very convenient ways of discovering and buying products. For sellers it is important to get their products in front of as many relevant customers as possible and make the sales process as painless as possible.

But more important that anything else for both parties is trust: easy to understand product information, high quality, relevant reviews by other customers, that the seller is reputable and has a history of delivery, and that the buyer will only be charged for his exact usage. For the seller it removes the burden of having to manage customers, measuring their usage and collecting payments for it.

The AWS Marketplace is a great step forward in making easier to buy and deploy software. It also makes it dead simple for ISVs for add hourly billing to their offerings and get their software in from of hundreds of thousands of active AWS customers.

For more information see the announcement at the AWS website, the "Introducing AWS Marketplace" video, the posting on the AWS blog and off course visit the AWS Marketplace for a test drive. Happy shopping!

Today Amazon Web Services is introducing Amazon CloudSearch, a new web service that brings the power of the Amazon.com’s search technology to every developer. Amazon CloudSearch provides a fully-featured search engine that is easy to manage and scale. It offers full-text search with features like faceting and user-defined rank functions. And like most AWS services, Amazon CloudSearch scales automatically as your data and traffic grow, making it an easy choice for applications small to large. With Amazon CloudSearch, developers just create a Search Domain, upload data, and start querying.

Why Search?

Search is an essential part of many of today's cloud-centric applications. While in our daily lives we are mostly familiar with the search functionality offered by web search, there are in fact many more cases where search is a fundamental component of an application. Search is a much broader technology than just the indexing of large collections of web pages. Many organizations have large collections of documents, structured and unstructured, that can benefit from a specialized search service. With the rise of the App developer culture there is an increasing number of consumer data sources that cannot be simply queried with a web search engine. Using specialized ranking functions these apps can give their customers a highly specialized search experience.

And increasingly, search is applied to data that, though called a "document" for the purposes of search, is really just a record in a database or an object in a NoSQL system. On the query side, we are used to seeing search results as users, but search results are increasingly being used at the core of complex distributed systems where the results are consumed by machines, not people.

With these applications in mind, our customers have told us that a cloud-based managed search service is high on their wish lists. Their main motivation is that existing search technologies, both commercial and open source, have proven to be hard to manage and complex to configure.

Amazon CloudSearch will have democratization effect as it offers features that have been out of reach for many customers. With Amazon CloudSearch, a powerful search engine is now in the hands of every developer, at our familiar low prices, using a pay-as-you-go model. It will allow developers to improve functionality of their products, at lower costs with almost zero administration. It is very simple to get started; customers can create a Search Domain, upload their documents, and can immediately start querying.

How it Works

Developers set up a Search Domain -- a set of resources in AWS that will serve as the home for one collection of data. Developers then access their domain through two HTTP-based endpoints: a document upload endpoint and a query endpoint. As developers send documents to the upload endpoint they are quickly incorporated into the searchable index and become searchable.

Developers can upload data either through the AWS console, from the command-line tools, or by sending their own HTTP POST requests to the upload endpoint.

There are three features that make it easy to configure and customize the search results to meet exactly the needs of the application.

Filtering: Conceptually, this is using a match in a document field to restrict the match set. For example, if documents have a "color" field, you can filter the matches for the color "red".

Ranking: Search has at least two major phases: matching and ranking. The query specifies which documents match, generating a match set. After that, scores are computed (or direct sort criterion is applied) for each of the matching documents to rank them best to worst. Amazon CloudSearch provides the ability to have customized ranking functions to fine tune the search results.

Faceting: Faceting allows you to categorize your search results into refinements on which the user can further search. For example, a user might search for ‘umbrellas’, and facets allow you to group the results by price, such as $0-$10, $10-$20, $20-$40, etc. Amazon CloudSearch also allows for result counts to be included in facets, so that each refinement has a count of the number of documents in that group. The example could then be: $0-$10 (4 items), $10-$20 (123 items), $20-$40 (57 items), etc.

For more information on the different configuration possibilities visit the Amazon CloudSearch detail page.

Automatic Scaling

Amazon CloudSearch is itself built on AWS, which enables it to handle scale.

Amazon CloudSearch supports both horizontal and vertical scaling. The main search index is kept in memory to ensure that requests can be served at very high rates. As developers add data, CloudSearch increases either the size of your underlying node or it increases the number of nodes in the cluster. To handle growing request rates, the service autoscales the number of instances handling queries.

Amazon CloudSearch is based on more than a decade of developing high quality search technologies for Amazon.com. It has been developed by A9, the Amazon.com subsidiary that focuses on search technologies. The technology that is used at all the different places where you can search on Amazon.com is also at the core of at Amazon CloudSearch.

Summary

With the launch of Amazon CloudSearch the Amazon Web Services remove yet another pain point for developers. Almost every application these days needs some form of search and as such every developer has to spend significant time implementing it. With Amazon CloudSearch developers can now simply focus on their application and leave the management of search to the cloud.

For more information see the Amazon CloudSearch detail pages, the Amazon CloudSearch Developer Guide and the posting on the AWS developer blog.

You can sign up for the Introduction To Amazon CloudSearch webinar on May 10.

From tax preparation to safe social networks, Amazon RDS brings new and innovative applications to the cloud

Empowering innovation is at the heart of everything we do at Amazon Web Services (AWS). I often get to meet, discuss, and learn from innovators how they are using AWS to deliver transformative applications to their users, customers and partners. Often we think about innovation as doing 'new things' or based on revolutionary new technologies such as DynamoDB, but it is more important to ensure that one can also innovate based on existing paradigms. One of the services that is very successful in driving innovation at our customers in this context is Amazon RDS, the Relational Database Service. Amazon RDS removes the headaches of running a relational database service reliably at scale, allowing Amazon RDS customers to focus on innovation for their customers.

Recently I had great conversations with Troy Otillio, Senior Development Manager at Intuit and Jack Murgia, Senior DevOps Engineer at Edmodo. Troy and his team have added a contextual social offering to the popular TurboTax and Intuit applications. Jack and his engineers have created a safe social app for teachers and students. These innovators use Amazon RDS in conjunction with other Amazon Web Services to build, scale and operate their applications. Below is my dialog with them. Read on.

Note: If you want to see how Amazon RDS can enable your creative agenda, sign up for the 60 day free trial.

Troy, Jack, Tell me a little bit about your app. What's unique and innovative about your service?

Troy: Live Community Platform is Intuit's flagship Contextual Social offering – Live Community makes it easy to find answers when and where you need them. This is a unique and innovative platform.

• Intelligent Social network - Facilitate topical Q&A conversations among employees, customers and our most valued super contributors.
• Large Seasonal Peaks – Our largest community supports TurboTax where the peak traffic during February or April is often 100's of times greater than a quiet day in June. Live Community Experience is deeply integrated into the tax experience, so we built a highly responsive and reliable web experience.
• Read-your-mind contextual integration – Our core innovation and underlying secret sauce involves selecting the most relevant content for a given page if not given user – to provide the right answer at the right time to our users.

Jack: Edmodo is the safe social network for education used by a network of over 6 million teachers and students worldwide that allows teachers to create and maintain their classroom communities. Some unique and innovative characteristics of Edmodo are:

• Edmodo is as easy to use as other social network sites, but secure - the teacher has the same control over access, content and behavior in Edmodo as he/she does in the classroom.
• Students gain experience they need for the modern workplace, learning how to work responsibly and effectively in a collaborative, project-based manner on a social website.
• Teachers can use Edmodo to share educational content, manage projects and assignments, handle notifications, and conduct quizzes and events.
• Teachers can interact with their colleagues in professional learning networks.
• Schools and districts can claim unique Edmodo web addresses for added communication and customization.

How are your users adopting and responding to your service?

Troy: We moved our service from internal servers to AWS. Our 25+ million strong TurboTax and Intuit user community grows every year and Live Community is an integral component of the overall product experience. Moving to AWS has enabled us with operational agility to deliver more value to those customers without having to worry about scale and infrastructure maintenance. We now have more time to focus on innovation while being confident that when demand increases we can easily add more capacity.

Jack:Since our launch in late 2008, we've grown to over 6 million teachers and students globally primarily through word of mouth of teachers who have shared Edmodo with each other. In addition to using Edmodo to engage students in classroom activities, teachers all over the world build profile pages on Edmodo, which they use to discover and share content, meet and stay in contact with other educators, and best practices and top resources.

Jack, how did this idea come about? How did you choose a SQL approach to solve this problem?

Jack: After years of seeing teachers struggle to share the web with their classroom, Edmodo founders Nic Borg and Jeff O'Hara knew there was a need for a highly scalable, secure social network targeted at K-12. SQL was the right choice because it was an established and proven technology for use in similar environments, and the massive knowledge base that exists around it.

And how about you Troy? Why did you choose a SQL approach to build your social community app?

Troy: The initial architecture was based on MySQL– we've continued with use of SQL but are now leveraging RDS. Of course, with as much textual data as we have we are leveraging Lucene/SOLR (a NoSQL solution) for Search and Semantic processing. More recently we've expanded our platform to include additional forms of user interaction observation in support of our real-time analytics – here we've begun to leverage NoSQL technologies like Redis. Going forward we'll continue to employ a hybrid approach using RDS for the necessary transactional computation and services like DynamoDB for high performance and scalability for structured data.

What did you find unique about RDS? What has been your experience so far?

Troy: We love RDS – it's reduced our operational workload by a noticeable factor but even more exciting is the benefits around fast recovery enabled by the Multi-Availability Zone capability. My team often brags about the one-click creation of read replicas, ability to upsize or downsize the database without downtime and automatic back-up. However, the shining moment occurred just last month – during peak load there was a hardware failure on the Server powering a RDS Master Database – RDS automatically failed over to the alternate zone within minutes and our customers experience was fully functional shortly thereafter. The best part was that the entire process was what I call Òhands freeÓ and took near zero development effort. With self-hosted databases we would have invested considerable engineering effort to implement, test and retest failover – to achieve fast recovery with RDS we simply changed our configuration. And when the actual production event took place the recovery required no manual intervention – the response from our CTO after hearing what happened: "that's cool".

We encountered a few situations that required help from the Amazon team – for example, we didn't know that the I/O capacity of the Server is governed by the size of storage and size of the server. When we first attempted to load our production database it took 28 hours – after a few days of attempts to reduce the load time through well-known optimizations (mostly documented on the RDS website) we were stuck at 8 hours. We consulted directly with Amazon and learned that the storage and the DB Server size affected I/O throughput – after altering our size we dropped our load time to 1 hour which was within expectations relative to native database.

Jack: Based on our experience during this period of phenomenal growth while our team productivity is stretched to the max, we see that:

• RDS is a huge time-saver
• RDS provides peace of mind about our data

Anything that saves time and simplifies processes for employees of a young startup has a positive affect that CAN NOT be overstated. The peace of mind part needs no explanation. Nobody on our team regrets moving to RDS MySQL - quite the opposite; we all agree we don't want to think about where we would have been without RDS. We have been able to meet our goal of architecting our application for 0% "maintenance downtime"

Out of the box, RDS' CloudWatch data and graphs speed up the troubleshooting process.

• Complete certainty in a DB environment is VERY unique- we never worry that:
• our DB parameters are identical across replicas, and changes propagate at a time of my choosing
• the recoverability of data
• Lack of root access to the underlying server OS was unique – but we have found it does not hinder us in anyway. Anything we have needed to accomplish, including a late night upgrade to MySQL 5.5 and implementation of Facebook's Online Schema Change for MySQL has been easily accomplished.

This is great to hear. We are glad we RDS meets your needs. Now, what's next on your innovation agenda?

Jack: We want to deliver an even more performance and rock solid experience for our global user base of teachers, students, administrators and parents. We will be:

• Building "incident managers" which utilize the cloud watch data and AWS APIs to automatically replace servers and/or re-deploy when problems arise.
• Building "incident creators" - servers which test our ability to maintain peak performance. 

We believe that by leveraging the services that Amazon provides to the fullest we can continue to scale our exceptional user experience so that Edmodo can be the platform for classrooms around the world on devices of all shapes and sizes.

Troy: At Intuit, we can go further to leverage the benefits of elasticity and further improve our resiliency. We are investing in use of CloudFormation coupled with Chef – the result will enable us to lower costs and further reduce risk.

Prior to AWS we had several tiers that we now think can be delegated to AWS services – this should free up our team to focus on our domain problems. For example, we are intending to replace our EC2/Memcache tier with ElastiCache, our batch processing with Simple Workflow and Web servers with CloudFront.

With our newfound agility we can launch new services quickly and there are a few on our plate in the near term. In some cases we are refactoring our system into smaller, discrete services, while in other cases we are creating wholesale new services Our core problem domain consists of extracting greater value out of textual and behavioral data which means that use of EMR and even the newly released Workflow should enable us to focus more on the domain and less on the system engineering.

Troy, Jack, Thank you both very much for sharing your unique experience. I look forward to hearing your progress.

Jack: Thank you. This has been a great dialog.

Troy: Thank you Werner. We appreciate the opportunity.

As I noted before, it's a great pleasure to talk to these innovators and how AWS helps their journey. If you have never used RDS before, you can sign up for a 60 day free trial What innovation will you bring to market? How will it change the world? We won't know until you try and build something.

Today’s AWS Elastic Beanstalk announcement of PHP and Git support reminded me of the post where I mentioned that we want to let a thousand platforms bloom on AWS. Some might ask why AWS would want a thousand platforms.

One of the most important AWS principles is flexibility. Flexibility is in the choice of software and languages running on AWS, in the tools and interfaces available to manipulate resources and applications, and in the ability to leverage services from other providers. One of our customers I met last week was talking about his application and how it runs on AWS; He collects geo-location data, analyzes and crunches this data using Elastic Map Reduce, stores the data for quick access in DynamoDB, runs his user interface on Heroku and his web services layer for mobile devices on Elastic Beanstalk. This application is a great way to highlight how developers might leverage different services, abstractions, and tools to deliver the most value to their customers.

If you’re seeking ultimate flexibility, AWS allows you to interact with services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) directly and to piece these services together in a building block fashion. This might incur some initial groundwork, especially if you just want to deploy a simple application. AWS CloudFormation can help bring the building blocks together through its template mechanism. This simplifies the provisioning and updates, but you’re still responsible for the operational aspects of running your application.

If you don’t need control over the software stack, you can use development platforms such as AppFog, Engine Yard, and Heroku to help you manage, deploy, and monitor your applications on AWS more easily. We’ve seen some newcomers in this space over the last year such as Stackato and NodeJitsu, and each platform continues to add value through highly curated software stacks and a set of management automation.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is another abstraction on top of the core AWS building blocks. It takes a different approach than most other development platforms by exposing the underlying resources. This approach provides the simplicity to quickly get started for application developers, but it also allows them to modify the stack to meet their goals. For example, one customer needed extensive Apache rewrite rules and a few other mods to meet his security requirements. He simply created a new AMI to use as his base for his Elastic Beanstalk container. Another pattern I have seen is customers attaching a debugger to the JVM running in their EC2 instance so that they can debug particular interaction patterns between their code and the JVM.

So is there a “one-size-fits-all” in the development platform space? No, each platform fits the needs of different developers, applications, and use cases. Preference and familiarity also play a role in why some developers choose one over the other. Ultimately, we want developers to successfully run and manage reliable, highly scalable applications on AWS, irrespective of the abstraction that their development platform of choice offers.

We will continue to work closely together with all current and future platform partners. Based on their feedback, we will develop new features and services that can help them be more successful by allowing them to focus on their customers instead of the infrastructure on which they run. This will also make it easier for new platforms to be developed such that developers will have more choice and flexibility, and they can really find the exact tools that make them most productive. AWS Elastic Beanstalk can play an important role there, too, because it is a good base for building new platforms. We are looking forward to seeing a thousand platforms bloom.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports PHP applications (in addition to Java) and the ability to deploy through the popular Git version control system. To get started using PHP and Git on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, visit Deploying PHP Applications Using Git in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide. More details about the release at the AWS developer blog.

AWS today announced a substantial price drop from March 1, 2012 for many of the Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon ElastiCache instances types around the world. For example, the popular m1.small instance type will see a price drop of 6% for EC2 On-Demand usage and 33% for EC2 Reserved Instance usage. Some of the other instance types have even greater savings: for example, the high memory M2 instances will see a 10% price cut for On Demand and 37% for Reserved instances. Similarly, Amazon RDS will cut its On-Demand prices by up to 10% and Reserved Instance prices by up to 42%. Amazon ElastiCache customers will see their prices drop by up to 10%, depending on their cache node types.

Driving costs down for our customers is part of the DNA of Amazon and therefore also part of the DNA of AWS. Customers are often surprised when our Solution Architects that are working with them have a relentless focus on helping customers to reduce their AWS bill wherever possible. We strongly believe that if we can help our customers reduce their costs, they are likely to be more successful in the long term. The relationship with our customers often becomes more that of a partnership as AWS truly has the customer’s best interest at heart and we are equally interested in their long-term success.

We will continue to drive AWS prices down, even without any competitive pressure to do so. And we will work hard to do this across all the different services, such as the price reduction for Amazon S3 and EBS last moth. I recently ran into a customer who explained that his invoice processing consolidation project was supposed to pay for itself within two years, but because of the continuous AWS price drops they were able to do it in 9 months. I am pretty sure that customer will adjust this estimate favorably again after today’s announcement.

Reducing pricing is not just a matter of passing on the benefits of economies of scale, although that certainly plays a role. We continuously apply all our innovative skills to the design of datacenters, servers, storage, network, etc. to drive new efficiencies and higher reliability. Experiences with the highly scalable, ultra-efficient supply chains of Amazon.com drive great new innovations in the highly redundant supply chains for AWS, which lead to new efficiencies that we can pass on to our customers. Also on the business model side, we continue to innovate, as the introduction of Reserved Instances and Spot Instances have helped customers make significant savings. With the new announcement, we have introduced volume discount tiers for Reserved Instances, which will provide additional discounts of 10% and 20%, both of which are in addition to the price cuts available to all customers, to further help customers drive down costs as they scale on AWS infrastructure.

For more details on the new pricing, visit the EC2 pricing page, RDS pricing page, ElastiCache page, forum announcement, and the AWS developer blog.

Today AWS launched an exciting new service for developers: the Amazon Simple Workflow Service. Amazon SWF is an orchestration service for building scalable distributed applications. Often an application consists of several different tasks to be performed in particular sequence driven by a set of dynamic conditions. Amazon SWF makes it very easy for developers to architect and implement these tasks, run them in the cloud or on premise and coordinate their flow. Amazon SWF manages the execution flow such that the tasks are load balanced across the registered workers, that inter-task dependencies are respected, that concurrency is handled appropriately and that child workflows are executed.

A growing number of applications are relying on asynchronous and distributed processing, with scalability of the application as the primary motivation. By designing autonomous distributed components, developers get the flexibility to deploy and scale out parts of the application independently as load increases. The asynchronous and distributed model has the benefits of loose coupling and selective scalability, but it also creates new challenges. Application developers must coordinate multiple distributed components to get the desired results. They must deal with the increased latency and unreliability inherent in remote communication. Components may take extended periods of time to complete tasks, requests may fail and errors originating from remote systems must be handled. Today, to accomplish this, developers are forced to write complicated infrastructure that typically involves message queues and databases along with complex logic to synchronize them. All this ‘plumbing’ is extraneous to business logic and makes the application code unnecessarily complicated and hard to maintain.

Amazon SWF enables applications to be built by orchestrating tasks coordinated by a decider process. Tasks represent logical units of work and are performed by application components that can take any form, including executable code, scripts, web service calls, and human actions. Developers have full control over implementing and orchestrating tasks, without worrying about underlying complexities such as tracking their progress and keeping their state.

Developers implement workers to perform tasks. They run their workers either on cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon EC2, or on-premise. Tasks can be long-running, may fail, may timeout and may complete with varying throughputs and latencies. Amazon SWF stores tasks for workers, assigns them when workers are ready, tracks their progress, and keeps their latest state, including details on their completion. To orchestrate tasks, developers write programs that get the latest state of tasks from Amazon SWF and use it to initiate subsequent tasks in an ongoing manner. Amazon SWF maintains an application’s execution state durably so that the application can be resilient to failures in individual application components.

An important feature of Amazon SWF is the auditability; Amazon SWF gives visibility into the execution of each step in the application. The Management Console and APIs let you monitor all running executions of the application. The customer can zoom in on any execution to see the status of each task and its input and output data. To facilitate troubleshooting and historical analysis, Amazon SWF retains the history of executions for any number of days that the customer cab specify, up to a maximum of 90 days.

Amazon SWF provides a collection of very powerful building blocks that also can be used to build higher-level execution engines. Some of our early customers used Amazon SWF to implement their domain specific languages (DL) for specialized business process execution, This is an area where I think the availability of Amazon SWF will drive a lot of innovation.

As part of the AWS SDK, the AWS Flow Framework helps developers create Amazon SWF based application quickly and easily. The Java version of the SDK includes really cool integration at the language level, making it easy for developers to automatically transform java code into tasks, create the right dependencies, and manage the execution of the workflow. This brings the power that some languages with built-in distribution and concurrency like Erlang offer to Java.

For more insight into workflow execution, task coordination, task routing, task distribution, exception handling, child workflows, timers, signals, markers and much more see the Amazon SWF detail page. More information about the SDK see the developers guide. As always The AWS developer blog has additional details. At the Rightscale blog Thorsten von Eicken talks about their use of SWF.