Amazon MP3
The beta of the long awaited DRM free Amazon music store is ready for use. Go download!
September 25, 2007
September 17, 2007
Amazon Widgets
A popular request has been to make more of the Amazon product data available as easy widgets for reuse on blogging, social network and associates websites. You can now find a nice collection of different widgets at http://widgets.amazon.com. Some of these were already available for associates, but there are some really nice new ones. The wish-list widget is one that I already put on this blog, but there are also new widgets for Unbox video previews, product image slide shows, product tags clouds, etc. The widgets are free for general use and if you are an associate you can have the widget code generated contains your tags so they can generate some cash for you.
August 10, 2007
No QA. No Backups. No Sleep
Midnight in Seattle. Amazon Hackday 2007 in progress. World-wide
August 3, 2007
The Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS)
Today Amazon AWS launched a limited public beta of Amazon FPS, the Amazon Flexible Payment Service. Amazon FPS is a payment service that is 100% focused on the needs of developers.
Traditionally, developers have been limited in how they can manage payments. If they need to charge with a certain frequency, execute a transaction at a specific time, combine many smaller payments into one single transaction or want to charge a commission on a transaction between two of their customers, they need to create their own payment infrastructure and processor relationships. This can be difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and with significant operational risks.
Amazon FPS changes the way developers can charge their customers. Using a capability called “Payment Instructions” developers can easily create the charging model that works best for them. For example, they can charge customers in small increments until their accumulated balance reaches a limit, pay a percentage of a digital transaction as a royalty, earn a commission on a marketplace transaction, or allow one customer to pay for another customer and limit their usage to a specific amount. Payment Instructions give developers the flexibility to build multiple charging models that exactly meet their needs.
Another important way in which Amazon FPS helps developers build effective charging models is by lowering the cost of transactions wherever possible. Amazon FPS is exposing a different fee structure for different payment methods (credit card, bank account or Amazon Payments balance) and if the actual cost to process a payment through a method is less, then Amazon FPS passes these savings on to the developer. Secondly Amazon FPS’s aggregation feature lets developers track and aggregate micro-payments into a single payment transaction, saving on transaction processing costs and avoiding having to build complex ledger functionality into their own applications. Using the aggregation functionality coupled with the lower Amazon FPS fees, developers can now pursue micro-payments businesses that previously have been cost-prohibitive.
The Flexible Payment Service integrates with the Amazon Payments operation such that Amazon customers can use the same login credentials and payment information they’ve already entered on Amazon.com to pay for any developer’s service that uses Amazon FPS. This helps Amazon customers keep their payment information secure while exploring new services and its helps developers by removing the typical friction associated with making a first-time or repeat purchase. More details for Amazon
More information at the Amazon FPS detail page and at Amazon Payments Information pages.
Also more background at the AWS weblog.
July 21, 2007
Potter Delivered
2.223 million pre-orders on our sites world-wide. 1.4 million on Amazom.com alone. These orders trickled in over the period of 5.5 months, but from a distributed systems perspective today is the day as these orders go en-masse from pre-orders to orders, being charged and delivered. It is one smooth operation. The planning for single day delivery is truly impressive, especially on the supply-chain, transportation and fulfillment side where we need to do this without impacting the regular delivery flow. 1.3M books are being delivered today weighing close to 1700 tons. The excitement that our customers have for this book absolutely rubs off on anyone involved with the process and it was absolutely marvelous to see the kids run out of their houses when the UPS truck arrived in our street.
December 17, 2006
The odds of getting a PS3 or Wii for Chrismas
As you have probably have heard by now Amazon is making Sony Playstation 3 (20 GB & 60 GB models) and Nintendo Wii available to existing Amazon customers who sign up via a special edition of the Amazon Customers Vote. A random draw will then decide who will get the change to buy these ridiculously scarce game machines.
Customers who have voted on these and early promotions have asked what the odds are that they would actually be selected a winner. The Customers Vote team has done an amazing job of putting the odds in perspective with some of the other odds in life. I think this is such a great list that I am replicating it here, as it is likely to disappear from the Amazon promotions pages eventually.
| You would have gotten an opportunity to buy the tent in Round 3 if you had voted for it | 2 to 1 | |
 |
Sony PS3 20GB* | 6 to 1 |
|
Nintendo Wii* | 16 to 1 |
| Your letter to The New York Times will be published (source) | 20 to 1 | |
| You'll get hemorrhoids (source) | 25 to 1 | |
|
Sony PS3 60GB* | 29 to 1 |
| You'll hunt small game next year (source) | 54 to 1 | |
| You'll seek hypnotic therapy (source) | 79 to 1 | |
| You'll get Botox next year (source) | 102 to 1 | |
| You would have gotten an opportunity to buy the Zune in Round 4 if you had voted for it | 122 to 1 | |
| Your tax return will be audited by the IRS (source) | 175 to 1 | |
| The person you're dating is a millionaire (source) | 215 to 1 | |
| Your book will be a New York Times bestseller (source) | 220 to 1 | |
| You go to a tractor pull or mud racing every month (source) | 311 to 1 | |
| You'll catch a baseball at a Major League Baseball game (source) | 563 to 1 | |
| You'll get botulism next year (source) | 2,300 to 1 | |
| You happen to be a private investigator (source) | 3,700 to 1 | |
| You'll pick a four-leaf clover on the first try (source) | 10,000 to 1 | |
| You'll die as a result of a major asteroid hitting Earth (source) | 20,000 to 1 | |
| You'll ever be a pro athlete (source) | 22,000 to 1 | |
| You'll ever date a supermodel (if you're a man) (source) | 88,000 to 1 | |
| Despite your efforts to avoid it, you'll actually get the plague next year (source) | 299,999 to 1 | |
| You'll be hit by lightning (source) | 576,000 to 1 | |
| You'll get bit by a shark (source) | 6,000,000 to 1 | |
| You'll win a Power Ball lottery with just one ticket (source) | 105,938,000 to 1 | |
| * These were the odds at Sunday morning 9 AM. This number will continue to change until the sign-up period ends at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, December 17. | ||
Vist the Amazon Customers Vote page to get updated numbers on the ongoing votes.
September 19, 2006
Fulfilling
Amazon continues on the path of opening up all of its services for customers and partners to use. One of the services customers repeatedly asked us for was to open up our fulfillment network for them to use. Currently there are over 1 million small and large active sellers on the Amazon platform and most need to do their own fulfillment and shipping. Which is a big hassle. This has been an area where Amazon has made significant progress in terms of optimization and cost-effectiveness and we already offered this to our partners through our enterprise services program. We are now also opening up our fulfillment network for everyone to use.
This service is dubbed “Fulfillment by Amazon”, and the low pricing reflects the kind of efficiencies that Amazon has been able to achieve. In completely self-service way you can send items to our warehouses and we will take care that the items get shipped to customers once they get sold. But the service is not limited to when your products are sold on Amazon.com; if you use WebStore to build your personalized storefront you will now have both the front-office and back-office of your own store powered by Amazon's technologies. And we handle the returns if necessary...
There are also major advantages from this program for our retail customers; if a 3rd party seller is using Fulfillment by Amazon its products will now be eligible for free shipping promotions and for Amazon Prime.
It was very interesting to see this service come to life. Quite a bit of innovation was necessary at the business, the software and the fulfillment side to completely open up all the functionality in a completely self-service manner to customers.
September 8, 2006
Unbox Remote Control
One of the coolest features in Unbox, Amazon’s Video Download Service, is the remote delivery. A video you have bought will show up in Your Media Library and from there you can control which PC the movie should be downloaded to. I just bought a Margaret Cho show while at work and asked it to be downloaded to a laptop at home. It will be there when I get home. Very useful.
Click on the image for more clarity
August 23, 2006
Amazon in Scotland
I have been easing my way back into Amazon life by visiting the Amazon Development Center Scotland (ADCS), located in the outskirts of Edinburgh. Before joining Amazon I was always skeptical whether distributing development could actually work. The overhead in communication, lack of quality personal contact and handling time-zones always seemed like barriers that were too high to overcome, and I have seen many cases fail. At Amazon however the small, agile team concept (2 pizza teams), which is the organizational structure that maps onto the strict service oriented nature of the Amazon technology platform, makes that teams are more easily “separable”. By now I have seen several examples where remote development teams are successfully developing and managing services within the Amazon platform.
We are in Scotland because of the access to great local talent. There are top engineers and architects in Scotland and we have an excellent team here. The center works on a number of innovative programs and it is amazing to see the impact they have on Amazon’s global business.
Click the image for full size and the flicker set for a few more.
July 26, 2006
Amazon 2 Second Life
I promised at Supernova I would give an update on the integration of Amazon.com (through Amazon.com E-Commerce Web Services) into Second Life: Jeff Barr has the scoop and demonstrates it on the Amazon Web Services Weblog. As expected it was a complete grassroots effort with no official Amazon involvement. Go visit the life2life store now (yes that is second life url, you need the program installed to use this as a locator).
And as Jeff mentions there is some really cool second life style interface innovation: you can talk to store and a search on Amazon will be triggered. Go try it out!
July 13, 2006
Your Queues are Ready
Yesterday the Amazon Simple Queue Service moved from beta to production. SQS provides persistent messaging with the scalability and reliability of Amazon’s infrastructure. As a developer you can create an unlimited number of Queues and store unlimited messages in a Queue. As usual we manage your data in highly reliable fashion, capable of surviving complete data center failures.
The API is dead simple: Create, Send, Receive and Delete. With sufficient access control such that you can determine who can read and write your queues. We have chosen a concurrency model where the process working on a message automatically acquires a leased lock on that message; if the message is not deleted before the lease expires it becomes available for processing again. Makes failure handling very simple.
Charging is as inexpensive as S3: 10 cents for a 1000 messages, and 20 cents per Gigabyte of data transferred
Code Samples and Documentation can be found here.
May 25, 2006
The Grocery
Another great new store launched today: Amazon.com Grocery
An Amazon store filled non-perishable grocery items all eligible for Prime and Super Saver Shipping.
An important new feature was launched alongside of it: Shopping Lists. This is like a wish list but you can use it for repeat purchases, different quantities and more.
Dewitt rates it as the coolest store of the year, but I think the Scientific & Industrial store launched last week is definitely the main competition for that honor.
tags: AMZN, Amazon.com inc, Amazon Grocery, Grocery, Shopping List
May 16, 2006
Industrial & Scientific
All you Make junkies, go visit Amazon Industrial & Scientifc (beta)!
May 15, 2006
The Amazon Technology Platform
Earlier this year my good friend and mentor Jim Gray dropped by at Amazon to interview me for ACM Queue magazine. I had real fun with Jim’s questions and I like to believe that the resulting interview is interesting. It appeared in this month’s edition and runs about 8 pages in the print edition.
It interview touches on many different topics around the Amazon Platform and I believe that there is quite a bit of information in the article that has never been publicized before. We get into Amazon’s technology history, scalability of services, the service architecture, large scale testing, large scale development, the retail and enterprise partner platforms, hiring, the relationship with academia, and many more.
April 4, 2006
On the Wire
I don't want to turn this into a corporate announcement weblog, but I believe some of my new readers may be interested in this.
Go check out Amazon Wire, a podcast about books, music, movies and those who create them.
March 14, 2006
S3 - The Amazon Simple Storage Service
Go check out the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This is Amazon.com’s Internet scale storage service available through a web service interface. S3 is another example of the Amazon Web Services mission: to expose all of the atomic-level pieces of the Amazon.com platform. Providing scalable, reliable, secure and fast storage is something that Amazon developers have already enjoyed for some time and now it is available to the developer community outside of Amazon.com.
S3 has a simple programmatic read/write interface through REST and SOAP services, and the data can be access through different distribution protocols. HTTP and BitTorrent are provided in this first release.
Congratulation to the S3 team!
February 10, 2006
Associating
I have to admit that one of the reasons for my “January Recommendations” posting was to experiment with the Amazon.com associates program. Associates earn up to 10% of the purchase if they drive traffic to Amazon.com and the customer actually places an order. Not that I was expecting to make any money of this, but I was interested in seeing what the experience is for an associate if s/he needs to create a collection of links, and how good the tools are for tracking the results.
It appears that my readers are not going to earn my dinner for me: of the almost 2000 people that saw the positing only 63 actually clicked on one of the links to visit the product page at Amazon.com. And none of you actually ordered something…
This is the summary from associates central:
As you can see 3.2% of you actually looked at the product detail pages referred to in the January recommendations posting. The last four columns are conversion, items ordered, items shipped, and referral fees. Sadly they are all still 0 (Conversion is the percentage of clicks that results in an order)
I am having great fun though with the tools at associates central. There is lots of trending tools and other reporting that allows you to build a real business out of being an associate.
It also gives you many more ways to collect referral fees than just direct product links. There are different sizes of banners for promotions in different categories, search boxes, and recommended product links.
The link above here is what Amazon.com will produce dynamically as recommended products for the keywords “service oriented architecture” in the books category. Next project is to see how easy it would be to integrate this into the weblog feeds…
update: the recommendation code generated by the associate program uses an iframe and as such the dynamic code doesn't show up in some of the feed readers. In the feeds I have replaced it with an image for the moment to show what it should have looked like.
February 8, 2006
Opportunities in Modeling Complex Distributed Systems
Modeling systems has always been part of the toolkit of the computer scientist. We often try to bring systems back to simple queuing models to understand throughput and latency questions, and then use those results to predict resource usage and drive allocation. Can one actually be confident that such a simple model can accurately reflect reality? With the increased complexity of distributed systems based on a large scale autonomous services model these techniques become a lot less reliable.
I would like to use modeling techniques to focus on more than just achieving simple SLAs. I want to understand the cost impact of using certain algorithms in combination with specific node and network configurations, especially under certain failure scenarios. I would use such an economic model during the design phase of a service or application, to evaluate different algorithms for achieving consistency and availability based on their cost impact. For example, if a service needs to achieve a state persistence that can survive a complete datacenter outage and the service needs to be accessed by clients in ten datacenters with a certain SLA, there is a range of algorithmic and configuration choices to be made.
In these situations, systems design has often focused on trying to achieve the performance and availability SLAs first, which in itself is difficult enough. The economics of the different algorithm and configuration choices are often considered to be of secondary importance. However, when you are determining the cost of a system, you have to consider the choice of the size of replication units in combination with the density of the storage nodes, the reliability of the storage system, the step-function cost of inter-datacenter networking, the location and reliability of data caches. This results in a base cost plus a cost per storage operation that is different in a quorum-based system when compared to a probabilistic system. This holds especially true when you include in this modeling the cost of recovering from a cache node, storage node or datacenter failure.
Many have assumed that throwing a lot of cheap hardware at the problem is the answer to many of these questions, but our experience is that when taking complex multi-datacenter configurations into account, the answers are less obvious. As we build new services we need better models that can handle these very complex, multi-variant scenarios to make sure we build the right services at the right cost. At Amazon we are fortunate to have a lot of data that will allow us to make progress on these questions.
I have positions open for experienced engineers/scientists who want to work on the problems of modeling complex distributed systems with me. To qualify for these jobs these are some of the things that I will look for:
- You have a very solid understanding of distributed systems and networking
- You know how to do data-driven analysis and truly understand statistics
- You understand large scale monitoring and data collection architectures
- You are familiar with the current state of the art in distributed systems modeling
- You are an experienced engineer with a track record of building complex systems
- If you are not that experienced, you may have an advanced degree with a proven expertise in modeling complex distributed systems and have demonstrated involvement with large software projects (e.g. open-source).
- You have a proven ability to effectively communicate the results of data analysis and modeling
- You live in or are willing to relocate to the greater Seattle area
If you are interested in this work and feel that you are qualified, send me an email with your resume.
Contact Info
Werner Vogels
CTO - Amazon.com
605 5th Ave S.
Seattle, WA, 98104
CTO - Amazon.com
605 5th Ave S.
Seattle, WA, 98104
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